Exterior, Fort Sumter, February 1865. The Gorge is at the right; the Left Flank is at the left.
From 1876 to 1898, Fort Sumter stood largely neglected, important mainly as a lighthouse station. Ungarrisoned, most of that time it was in the charge of a “fortkeeper” or an ordnance sergeant. Without proper funds for maintenance, Fort Sumter, even then visited by thousands each year, fell into a state of dilapidation. By 1887 the wooden platforms of the barbette guns had rotted away so that “not one gun could be safely fired”; the neat earth slopes had eroded into “irregular mounds”; and quantities of sand had drifted into the parade ground. The casemate guns rusted so that they could not be traversed; salt water dashed freely through the open embrasures, the shutters of which were no longer in working order.
The Spanish-American War, 1898, prompted the construction in 1899 of a battery of two long-range rifled cannon at Fort Sumter. The massive concrete emplacement for this battery (named for Isaac Huger, South Carolinian, general in the American Revolution) dominates the central portion of Fort Sumter today. The guns, long since outmoded, were removed about 1941. During World War II, Fort Sumter was armed with 90-mm. antiaircraft guns manned by a garrison of Coast Artillery.
Guide to the Area
The following guide should be used with the map on pages 22 and 23. Numbers on the map correspond to the numbers in the text below.
One of the 12-inch guns of Battery Huger, as mounted in 1901.
1. LEFT-FLANK EXTERIOR. Entrance to Fort Sumter is by way of a modern sally port built through the center of the fort’s left flank. This sally port, erected after the Civil War, replaced a gun embrasure. The two 13-inch mortars mounted outside this entry serve as the visitor’s introduction to the ordnance now located at Fort Sumter. In 1863-65 Federal troops on Morris Island used this type of mortar against the fort. A marker on the left flank near the sally port honors the Confederate defenders of Fort Sumter.
2. LEFT-FLANK CASEMATES. The casemates (gunrooms) of the lower tier on the left flank were surmounted by a second tier identical in appearance. Above the second-tier casemates, guns were mounted en barbette on an open terreplein. This arrangement was also used on the fort’s right flank and on its right and left faces. Each casemate contained one gun, which could be moved on a track for crossfiring through the embrasure. Fort Sumter was designed for an armament of 135 guns and a garrison of 650 men. There are now two guns mounted on the casemate carriages in the left flank. The one on the left of the sally port is a rifled and banded “42-pounder”; the one on the right is a 42-pound smoothbore. Shielded (by the mass of the gorge) from Federal guns on Morris Island, 1863-65, the left flank casemates were used as a Confederate headquarters and hospital. The lower half of the outer wall retained its full height until the end of the siege, but was leveled to approximately half its original height during the 1870’s.