Fort Pulaski

We went to Fort Pulaski on Wednesday.

Although I'm not really a fort/battlefield type of person, it was a pretty thought-provoking experience.

One of a series of coastal fortifications along the country's coast, Fort Pulaski is a combination of medevial and mid-19th century modern.

It has a moat,

heavy wooden and iron doors (all the harder to chop down, my dear),

and an interior grill behind the big wooden doors.

You really do feel like you are entering into an American castle.

Except it's made of brick — two types, they like to tell you on the tour — and I think you can tell it's a 19th-century building just by looking at it, although I can't explain why.

The guide gave us a great tour.

He explained a lot about the fort's construction, and his explanations made me want know more about the workers who built these structures for the army. Fort Pulaski was built by a combination of free and slave labor, and I wondered how the officer in charge organized those labor relations, and what it was like to live out in a swamp building a fort from the mud up.

Still, although the design of the fort is interesting, and it was clearly an engineering feat, by the time this "castle" saw action, its design no longer held off the enemy.

New weaponry, most particularly rifled cannon, which are much more accurate than earlier smooth bore weapons, spelled the demise of the brick fort in general, and this one in particular.

And so, during the Civil War, U.S. troops on Tybee Island fired thousands of shells at the fort over the course of 30 hours in April 1862, and the Confederates surrendered. The brick fort was already obsolete, even though it had only been completed in the late 1840s. Instead, forts such as the Cape Fear's Fort Fisher became the state-of-the-art during the Civil War.

U.S. Library of Congress, Timothy H. O'Sullivan

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