Seven of the Navy's gunboats were of larger types, displacing over 1300 tons. They represented five different basic designs: Dolphin, built in the mid-1880s as a dispatch vessel; Concord (Gunboat # 3) and Bennington (Gunboat # 4), sea-going ships with relatively heavy gun batteries; Nashville (Gunboat # 7), a seagoing gunboat of relatively shallow draft; Wilmington (Gunboat # 8) and Helena (Gunboat # 9), lightly armored and intended for service in rivers; and Topeka, an older ship purchased in England just before the war started.

With two exceptions, these ships performed their war service in the Caribbean. Concord was in the Asiatic Squadron and took part in the Battle of Manila Bay. Her sister ship, Bennington, spent the war in the eastern Pacific and Hawaii. The latter ship was lost to a boiler explosion in 1905, Concord left active service before World War I, but the others lasted at least up to the 1920s. Remarkably, Wilmington, then nearly fifty years old, remained on duty throughout the Second World War.