Savannah is a beautiful, old city right on the coast. Like many east coast towns it has lots of colorful history and architecture dating back to the 1700’s. While here, we took the opportunity to take in a bit of Civil War history visiting Fort Pulaski. This fort was part of a series of fortifications built along the Atlantic coast in the early to mid 19th century after the war of 1812. Interestingly, when South Carolina succeeded from the Union near the end of 1860 the fort was not quite completed and still unmanned. The federal fort was seized by the state of Georgia and handed over to the Confederate States of America a few weeks later when Georgia succeeded from the Union. The fort was largely considered among the most invincible in the world at the time due to its then state of the art construction which featured 7 foot thick brick walls and space for 140 cannons. Interestingly it took less than 2 days of artillery fire by the Union Army in the spring of 1862 to force the confederates to surrender the fort. The effectiveness of the artillery fire was due solely to the use of experimental rifled cannons which significantly increased the range and accuracy of the artillery used previously. We toured the fort and were able to see where one of these cannon shots landed inside the fort and ricocheted off a series of walls finally lodging in the brick wall adjacent to the door to what they call the powder magazine. At the time, the powder magazine housed 40,000 pounds of gunpowder. Evidently the surrender came quickly after that near miss. Fort Pulaski was also the place where Robert E. Lee launched his military career. He was stationed there after graduating West Point and oversaw some of the construction at the fort.
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| Upper level of fort with series of spots for cannons |
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| Moat surrounding fort - we saw an alligator in here |
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| Inside the fort |
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