CHARLESTON - As many as 10,000 people, including 6,000 Civil War re-enactors, are expected to march in a funeral procession for the crew of the H.L. Hunley, the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship.

"It means a lot to us as Southerners. It means a lot to us as Americans to make sure these sailors do indeed have a solemn, dignified Christian burial," says Kay Long, a member of the committee organizing the event, which has been called the last Confederate funeral.

In the days leading up to Saturday's funeral, the public may pay their respects to the crew first at the aircraft carrier Yorktown at the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum and later at area churches.

There also will be concerts, exhibits and lectures during which portraits based on facial reconstruction of the crew will be unveiled.

"This is a funeral for eight very brave men who will go down in the annals of maritime history," Long said.

The hand-cranked, 40-foot Hunley became the first sub to sink an enemy warship when, on Feb. 17, 1864, it rammed a spar with a black powder charge into the Union blockade ship Housatonic.

The Hunley and its crew never returned, although scientists still are not sure why it sank. The vessel was located off Sullivans Island nine years ago.

It was raised in 2000 and, as cannons boomed on shore and pleasure craft circled, the sub was brought to a conservation lab at the old Charleston Naval Base, where it now sits in a tank of cold water.

After the conservation is complete, the Hunley will be displayed in a museum in North Charleston, not far from the lab.

Organizers expect an additional 20,000 spectators to attend the funeral in this city where the Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

"It probably is the last funeral of the War Between the States," said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, the chairman of the S.C. Hunley Commission.

It will be the second time in recent years a funeral procession with coffins draped with Confederate flags will wind its way the five miles from Charleston's Battery, looking out toward Sumter, to Magnolia Cemetery.

Four years ago, hundreds of re-enactors and a crowd of about 2,500 gathered as the first of the three Hunley crews was reburied at Magnolia.

The first crew drowned in the fall of 1863, when water from the wake of a passing ship flooded the submarine at its mooring. A few weeks later, a second crew, including designer H.L. Hunley, died during a test run.

The first crew, along with other Confederate sailors, had been buried in another cemetery covered when The Citadel's football stadium was built in 1948.

The remains were left behind because of a clerical error. The city allowed the graves to be moved, but a letter spelling out those wishes gave permission to move only the headstones.

The crew was unearthed from below the stadium in 1999 and buried beside the second crew in an oak and palmetto-shaded grove at Magnolia Cemetery. Now, the third crew will join the others in the Hunley plot brushed by breezes from the nearby Cooper River.

For the past three years, genealogist Linda Abrams has been working to track down the personal histories of the crewmen with mixed success.

Abrams of Longmeadow, Mass., whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, estimates she has spent 6,000 hours on the project.

She has tracked down solid information on three of the crewmen and descendants of two of them - Frank Collins, a Fredericksburg, Va., native and Joseph Ridgaway, born on Maryland's Eastern Shore - will attend Saturday's funeral.

Ceremonies with re-enactors honoring both men were recently held in their home states.

Little is still known about four of the crewman except their names and, from studies of their remains, that they were foreign-born, Abrams said.

One crewman is listed only by the name Miller.

Another is named Simpkins, but Abrams says there's evidence the name could be Lumpkin, of which there are many in Georgia.

Abrams, who has helped find the relatives for more than 600 Americans killed in wars, called the Hunley project "almost impossible. It's the most difficult research I have ever worked on."

She said most of the men never married and they died 140 years ago, leaving a scant paper trail.