Cannon fire at Patriots Point

Ten artillery pieces, including two originals, were fired at Fort Sumter today on the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. My daughter did a nice job of catching the flames and the Rebel cheers.

We could hear the occasional thump of the guns even after we left Patriots Point near Charleston.

Fort Defiance park opens next week

The City of Clarksville, Tenn., will open the Fort Defiance Civil War Park and Interpretive Center on April 9. Fort Defiance, which overlooks the confluence of the Red and Cumberland Rivers, was a cornerstone of the Confederate defense of the area and, subsequently, an important part of the eventual Union occupation of Clarksville. • Article

"Victorian Secrets": Ladies' undergarments and fashions during the Civil War

Gloria Swift has dressed in woolen tunic and pants while serving on a Civil War artillery demonstration crew.

She’s also worn a chemise, corset, underskirt and other layers to show visitors at Fort Pulaski National Monument near Savannah, Ga., ladies’ fashions during the Civil War.

The coolest get-up during those incredibly hot Savannah days?

Wear the artillery uniform, she advises.

The National Park Service ranger is organizing two programs at the fort this Sunday, March 27, as part of Women’s History Month.

At 11 a.m., a model, in a program called “Victorian Secrets,” will be dressed from the “inside out” to show all the undergarments a woman of means put on “before going to town.”

Unless she had assistance, a woman put on her stockings and shoes on first. Drawers, a chemise, corset, an underskirt, a hoop, an overskirt and the dress followed.

“How lucky we are to have pants these days,” quipped Swift.

A fashion show follows at 1 p.m. A park employee will display a civilian gentleman’s fashions of the day while women showcase everyday and traveling dresses, as well as a ball gown.

The Victorian Era, as we know, was a time of public modesty, but some women knew how “to flash an ankle.”

“Clever women who wanted to be a little seen wore red stockings or red stripes,” Swift told the Picket. “It was scandalous.”

Of course, fashions had much to do with social status and other circumstances. Most women during the war made do with a day dress, bodice and apron.

Union blockades eventually starved the South of war material and clothing.

“In the South, you saw less and less new patterns” as times got lean, Swift said. Women customized the one or two available dress styles.

Soldiers’ wives lived at Pulaski (above) both during and after its fall in 1862. This weekend’s program is a way to let visitors know about the battles and the people back home.

“Let’s tell the other side of the story,” Swift said.

The fee at Fort Pulaski is $5 per person; children ages 15 and under are free. Call the park at (912) 786-5787 for more details.

Cannonnball detonated in Virginia

A Napoleon 12-pound artillery shell that could be from the Civil War era was found at Fort Lee, south of Richmond, Va., and explosives experts were called in to detonate it. • Article

Battle diorama finds a new home

A diorama depicting the 1863 assault by Union forces on the Confederate Battery Wagner near Charleston, S.C., will serve as a centerpiece for a restored lodge's new life: as a museum for the rich but unheralded history of James Island. • Article

Event this Saturday at Florida fort

Gulf Islands National Seashore on Saturday (Jan. 8) will host living history presentations and special candlelight tours (reservations required) at Fort Barrancas. On Jan. 8, 1861, Florida state troops demanded the surrender of Fort Barrancas and the commanding officer issued orders for guns to be made combat-ready at all three Pensacola forts (Barrancas, Pickens and McRee). “The First Shot in Pensacola" was triggered at Fort Barrancas that night when Federal troops fired warning shots to discourage a suspected attack by state troops. • Article

Citadel cadets to re-enact firing on vessel

Citadel cadets in Charleston, S.C. plan to re-create a key moment in Civil War history next month. On Jan. 8, more than a dozen cadets and faculty will travel to Morris Island to re-enact the firing on the Union supply ship Star of the West. • Details

Fort Donelson re-enactment this weekend

Some 1,300 Civil War buffs gathering in northern Mississippi this weekend will re-enact a battle that actually took place in Tennessee. People dressed as Union and Confederate soldiers are recreating the Battle of Fort Donelson, which took place in February 1862 near Dover. • Article

Worthy tales from Fort Pulaski

New exhibits in the visitors center led a writer back to Fort Pulaski (Ga.) last week, where she learned a few stories. • Article

July 4 baseball game set for Fort Pulaski

Weekend events at masonry fort near Savannah include cannon demonstrations, music and America's pastime. • Details

First cannonball fired at Fort Sumter sits outside Georgia courthouse. Or does it?

Virginia planter Edmund Ruffin’s first foray into South Carolina seemed peaceful enough. He came to preach advancements in agriculture, crop rotation among them.

When he returned to Charleston on the eve of the Civil War, however, Ruffin brought with him the seeds of Southern independence.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, the 66-year-old slaveholder, "fire eating" secessionist and Palmetto Guards volunteer tucked his long white mane under his hat and fired the first shot of a war that would kill more than 600,000 Americans.

“The first shell from Columbiad No. 1, fired by the venerable Ruffin burst directly upon the parapet of the southwest angle of the fort,” wrote Capt. G. B. Cuthbert of the Palmetto Guards.

Thirty-four terrifying and exhausting hours after Ruffin put fire to fuse on Cummings Point, Col. Robert Anderson and his Union garrison surrendered.

The bombardment, of course, had thousands of eyewitnesses. Legends were born instantly.

One of them involves P.W. Alexander, an intrepid correspondent from Thomaston, Ga., who made a bee line to Fort Sumter with a purpose. He wanted to retrieve that historic first shot fired by Ruffin.

“The big 10-inch ball fell within Fort Sumter without doing any damage,” reads an old Thomaston Times article. “Alexander, who for years had boarded in the home of Mr. and Mrs. B. B. White, was an eyewitness to this scene. He saw just where the ball fell and immediately after the surrender procured it and sent it to his friend, B.B. White."

Today, nearly 800,000 people each year take the ferry ride to Fort Sumter to see where the carnage and restoration of the Union began. Many fewer tread on the grounds of the Upson County courthouse in Thomaston, 300 miles from Charleston and 60 miles south of Atlanta.

If they do, they’ll see a tall monument to Confederate dead and that cannonball retrieved by Alexander, perched on a marble monument with this 1953 inscription:

"Presented to the UDC [United Daughters of the Confederacy] by Mrs. Sallie White to whom it was given in 1861 by P.W. Alexander, leading Confederate war correspondent who was present when the ball was fired and knew it to be the first. The first marker stating these facts was erected on this square in 1919."

The cannonball had a more practical household purpose before it was ensconced on the monument pedestal.

“A colorful Upson tale says that P.W. Alexander retrieved the first cannonball fired in the Civil War from the mud in front of the fort, and brought it back to the B. B. White family in Thomaston,” according to a 1998 article by USGenWeb Archives. “The story maintains that this relic served as a door stop at the house, or lay under the porch, for several decades before being elevated to the marble pedestal on which it graces Thomaston's courthouse square today.”

Alexander, a lawyer and noted Confederate war correspondent who wrote about the brutality of war, can’t confirm the tale. He died in 1886.

Penny Cliff, director for the Thomaston-Upson Archives, and her staff have to do the talking for him.

"Whenever I give tours around the square I use the word 'allegedly' in regards to the 'first' cannonball fired at Fort Sumter," Cliff said.

"I do, however, believe it is definitely one of the 'hot shots' fired at the fort. Even if it is not the first, it is historically important in the fact that it is one of the cannonballs fired at Fort Sumter."

History, of course, is subjective and never 100 percent accurate. It’s fair to say that we really don’t know if this iron ball was, in fact, the first shot fired during the Civil War. Historians even disagree on whether another Confederate battery first fired on Sumter, cheating Ruffin of the honors.

But one thing is for certain.

In June 1865, two months after the South surrendered, a despondent Edmund Ruffin took up another firearm.

He propped his rifle on a trunk between his feet, stuck the barrel into his mouth and opened fire.

The war was over.

Fort Morgan now witness to war on oil leak

Until last week, Fort Morgan, the guardian of Mobile Bay, hadn’t seen a war for nearly 150 years.

The star-shaped fortification is now bearing witness to Man vs. Oil.

Piles of oil-fighting equipment and a large staging point for clean-up workers lie within sight of where Union Adm. David Farragut uttered “Damn the Torpedoes” during his famous charge past Fort Morgan and into Mobile Bay.

Fort Morgan, built of millions of bricks, stood guard over the bay’s entrance from 1834 through World War II. Several concrete-supported batteries were added more than a century ago, but the look of the fort takes you back to the Civil War era.

The current crisis brought us back to reality.

Coast Guard and other helicopters roared by, looking for the latest wave of BP oil reaching shore.

Military Humvees were parked by the ferry to Dauphin Island. Trucks brought supplies to the staging point, one of many along the Alabama coast. President Obama stopped near the fort Monday during a visit to the region.

I felt a bit guilty touring the fort on a while so much environmental and economic turmoil swirled around us.

Residents of a condo where we stayed for a wedding said business was down at least 50 percent and people were still canceling bookings. A waitress at a restaurant marina on the way to Fort Morgan said the place normally would be much more crowded at its 8 a.m. opening.

We did notice other visitors at the fort, which we spent an hour exploring Saturday morning. Sweat rolled down our faces as climbed stairs and walked through casemates and by gun batteries.

The Union fleet won an important victory there in 1864. Mobile was one of the last major Confederate ports still open. Fort Morgan, with a garrison of about 600, and other fortifications meant to keep Farragut out. The bay was heavily mined with what were then called torpedoes.

On Aug. 5, 1864, the monitor USS Tecumseh struck a mine within a few hundred yards of the fort. More than 90 hands died when the monitor rolled over and sank. The other 17 Union vessels began to move back, but Farragut, on board the USS Hartford, demanded the fleet move through.

Farragut triumphed over the opposition of heavy batteries in Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines. His fleet secured the surrender of the ironclad CSS Tennessee and defeated the squadron of Confederate Adm. Franklin Buchanan.

The victory, together with the fall of Atlanta, was a significant boost for President Abraham Lincoln.

The region this week needs some news to cheer. Over the weekend, we saw swaths of oil on several stretches of beach. Our children tried vainly to pull a crab out of an oil patch.

So many heart-wrenching scenes.

I’m hoping for better days soon for the people and animals that call Gulf Shores home. Please keep them in your prayers.

Ft. Sanders bigger than historians thought?

Now-retired University of Tennessee archaeologist Dr. Charles Faulkner and his wife, historian Terry Faulkner, have dug into the Knoxville fort's past. They say what they found changes 50 years of thought about where Fort Sanders sat in 1863 and adds information about its later expansion. • Article

Gulf oil ashore at historic Fort Morgan

Globs of oil were washing into Mobile Bay on Thursday and spotting the white-sand beach on the bay's eastern side at Fort Morgan, Ala. The coin-size globs could be seen in the water rolling along the bay's bottom, and the soft, redish-brown goo glistened in the sun on the sand near the historic Civil War fort. • Details

Fort Tyler: Last fort to fall in war worth a visit

At 16, Alexander Campbell Lanier joined the war, got captured and missed supper -- all on the same day.

Lanier had slipped away from his West Point, Ga., home when fighting began that morning and rushed uphill to Fort Tyler at the town’s highest point.

But the town’s resistance to 3,500 Union forces ended the evening of April 16, 1865, after the death of the earthen fort’s commander, Gen. Robert C. Tyler (below), a dozen other Confederates and the surrender of the outgunned garrison.

Lanier and approximately 250 soldiers and civilians were marched to the town below. The family was not aware of his being at the fort until he waved at his mother as he was passing the house.

Fort Tyler is a small footnote to the closing days of the war. It was taken a week after Lee surrendered at Appomattox and one day after President Abraham Lincoln died of a mortal shot to the head. Combatants knew of neither occurrence.

Townspeople are proud of this last-ditch resistance to Union troops bound on destroying vital railroad facilities. Because the gauges of the rails were different between Alabama and Georgia, train cargo had to be transferred between cars here, which necessitated a large railroad yard in West Point. Confederates meant to guard a wagon and railroad bridge.

“There are people here who have ancestors who were in the fort,” says Fort Tyler Association President Rea (pronounced Ray) Clark.

I paid a visit this week to West Point, which straddles the Chattahoochee River at the Alabama border near Interstate 85. Today, the town is best known for great fishing at West Point Lake and the new Kia Georgia manufacturing facility a few miles northeast of town.

Fort Tyler, the last to fall in the Civil War, might be called Fort Stateline, since a portion is in Alabama and another part is in Georgia. The fenced property abuts several residences.

Clark quipped that rifle demonstrations are OK, but not artillery. “We don’t want to have to pay for broken windows.”

The fort has quite an unusual history.

Yankee troops burned two depots in West Point and blew up the powder magazine in the fort, creating a crater. Around 1897, the city filled in the hole with concrete and made a reservoir, which operated until the 1920s or 1930s.

Fort Tyler was gone.

That’s when townspeople got busy. They raised money and rebuilt the fort in 1996-97, dedicating it in 1998. Because there are no photos of the fort, they worked from first-hand accounts to re-create the 35-yard rectangular salient.

I was impressed by the many interpretive signs that line the shaded zig-zag trail to the top. You can walk through the fort and learn more about its three artillery pieces.

Clark said a living history and fundraising dinner were held last week on the Battle of West Point’s 145th anniversary.

The association and the West Point Visitors’ Center will soon begin filming a 17-minute film on the battle. It will be shown to visitors and schoolchildren at the Visitors’ Center in the old downtown depot.

“It will be Ken Burns caliber but without a Ken Burns budget,” Visitors’ Center Executive Director Malinda C. Powers says of the film.

For now, the association uses its Web site to publicize the well-maintained fort. Clark says he doesn’t know how many visitors the venue draws.

He’s hoping the Visitors’ Center can one day house a Fort Tyler museum and some relics found on the property.

The Visitors’ Center opened last year in conjunction with the Kia plant beginning operations, says Powers. She hopes business will pick up downtown when the economy improves and Kia workers start buying homes.

“Once we get people moving in we will have more stores.”

The Kia plant is a boon for West Point and nearby Alabama towns, which were home to cotton and textile manufacturing plants, long gone overseas.

I concluded my visit with a stop at Pinewood Cemetery, where Gen. Tyler and 76 Confederate and Union troops, most of them unknown, are buried.

The enigmatic Tyler, who lost a leg earlier in the war, was shot by a sniper and died under a battle flag made by the ladies of West Point. He was the last general to die in the Civil War.

From West Point, Union Gen. James Wilson's Raiders destroyed 19 locomotives and burned 340 cars, and moved east up the tracks to LaGrange and eventually to Macon.

• Click here for more info on the Fort Tyler Association.