Auchincloss children aboard the Kearsarge with the ship's mascot
On July 24, 1901 the Battleship Kearsarge accidentally fired a shell while at anchor in Narragansett Bay. Fragments from the one inch shell struck Newport’s City Hall from a distance of one ½ miles, causing pockmarks and an evacuation of the building. The USS Battleship Kearsarge (BB 5) was commissioned in 1900 and was the flagship of the Atlantic Squadron. The ship was later converted to a crane ship and scrapped in 1955.
City Hall survived the shelling but lost its top floor and tower to a fire around 1926.