Coastal Fortifications

[Darman]

Took a few more pictures yesterday and today.  Yesterday was mostly the westwall (mounted 117 cannon and faced out to defend the East Passage).  Today was mostly the land defenses.  As far as I know the fort contains the only two tenailles in the United States.  Unfortunately the batteries on my camera died before I could photograph them. 


North Wall of the fort, there are two bastions and I was standing at the point of one of them.  There is also a gate. 


They have one (original-they fished it out of the harbor) 24pdr on a replica gun carriage mounted in one of the casemates on the North Wall. 

Apparently the fort has been under attack recently....



West Wall!  This wall has double-tiered casemates and faces the East Passage, which is the main entrance to the harbor. 




A view of the passage.  I estimated it was about 1-2 miles wide. 


This is a more modern addition: a fire-control tower I think added around WW2.


I'll do the landward defenses in a new post. 

[Darman]

This is the inner ditch.  The main wall is on the right, the outer wall is on the left.  


This is what made the inner ditch a kill zone: rifle ports facing the main walls from inside the outer wall.  Also there are howitzer casemates that are positioned to sweep across the entire length of the inner ditch.


This is how to get up onto the wall.  I tried running up a few times, just cuz I was bored.  Some of them are unfortunately falling apart.  


The Southwest Bastion has been restored somewhat.  The upper level has been somewhat cleared off.  There is a magazine located here, its basically a giant mound of dirt with a brick room inside.  I'm not certain if it was original or added to service the two 15-inch Rodmans placed here after the Civil War.  


You can see the magazine in the bottom picture.  

Magazine:


This is a Rodman gun position:


What a view!  I'd love to be able to put a small hut up on the wall and live there.  This is the view from the Rodmans.  I can see why they put their two most powerful guns in this position.




Unfortunately thats it for the pictures.  The rest are fuzzy or duplicates.  This is about when I ran out of batteries too.  I wandered down in the outer ditch and was going to visit the Endicott batteries but I decided to wait for another day when I could actually take pictures.  

PS:  If anyone knows anything about pintle mounts for smoothbores and Rodmans I am more than happy to learn, because the landward walls are covered in supposedly original pintle mounts for their guns. 

[ctwaterman]

cool

[miketr]

cool

Very Cool