One of them was the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was the father of the future Supreme Court justice of the same name. He wrote a sad and angry poem to protest the planned destruction of the ship. He called his poem, not surprisingly, “Old Ironsides.”

The ship was saved -- mostly because of the poem -- but its condition worsened over the next century. In 1925, a national fund-raising campaign paid for a badly-needed restoration.

The U.S.S. Constitution is now a national historic monument. “Old Ironsides” rests at the Boston Navy Yard in Massachusetts.

I’m Christopher Cruise. From all of us at The Voice of America, thanks for listening today, and we’ll see you tomorrow!