Interactive panoramas: Fort Morgan on Alabama's Gulf Coast

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          South side of Fort Morgan, facing the Gulf. (Click on image for full-screen version.)

On a sun-splashed morning, two men fished in the surf, a couple walked slowly on State Rt. 180 and a handful of visitors surveyed the immense brick walls of historic Fort Morgan, one of the Rebels' defenses along Alabama's Gulf Coast. Several miles down the two-lane road  to the fort, vacation homes dot the landscape near white sand beaches, where hundreds of tourists enjoyed perfect summer weather. Nearly 151 years earlier, the scene along this coast was much different ...

                           Slaves and New England masons constructed the fort in 1834.

... For the 500-plus Rebel soldiers garrisoned at the fort, life was bleak. Fort Morgan was a key outpost guarding strategic Mobile Bay, but its remote location led scores of men there to turn to an age-old demon: alcohol. "Many of the soldiers here were drunk all the time," a living historian at the fort told me during my recent visit.  The interactive panorama above shows the "murder ditch." If an enemy got this far, the fort's defenders might fire, say, canister from the embrasures, making life quite difficult for attackers ...

                  ;Interior of the fort, which also was used during Spanish-American War 
                                                          and World Wars I and II.

When Admiral David Farragut's 18-ship fleet tried to slip past the fort and into Mobile Bay on Aug. 5, 1864, one of his vessels, the ironclad U.S.S. Tecumseh, was sunk by a mine with a loss of nearly 100 sailors. The wreck of the ship still lies today upside down at the bottom of Mobile Bay, apparently untouched by archaeologists since the late 1960s. After an 18-day siege by forces that included the 2nd Connecticut Light Artillery, the Yankees captured the fort on Aug. 23, 1864. The four-story citadel in the fort's interior -- the barracks where many of the enlisted men lived -- was heavily damaged during the 1864 siege and later torn down. Little evidence of it remains today. ...

View of cramped quarters for soldiers at Fort Morgan.

1864 image of the ruins Fort Morgan. (Library of Congress)

On April 30, 1863, Fort Morgan's Confederate commander was decapitated when a cannon tube exploded after it was test-fired. "I immediately went over and found that his head was entirely severed from his body and scattered some distance," a comrade wrote in a brutally honest letter to Lieutenant-colonel Charles Stewart's wife that July. "...I believe the piece that struck him, from observation made by other officers, myself, weighed over 200 pounds -- after hitting him it struck against some sandbags and fell into the ditch below. I am satisfied that he never knew what hit him." Pieces of the officer's head, Charles Collins noted in the letter to his Stewart's wife, were gathered and placed in his coffin. A partial dental plate was also collected -- it may be seen today in Fort Morgan's museum along with a transcript of Collins' letter...


                               Rebel chaplain Noble DeVotie drowned near here in 1861.

... On Feb. 12, 1861, two months before the war started, a Rebel chaplain drowned in Mobile Bay, on the north side of the fort. An Alabama Historical Association marker (below) near the site notes that 23-year-old Noble Leslie DeVotie, a former student at the University of Alabama and a founder of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, was the "first Alabama soldier to die in Civil War." Of course, the war did not officially begin until the Rebels bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. DeVotie's body was recovered three days after he drowned.

Confederate chaplain Noble Leslie DeVotie drowned near the fort on Feb. 12, 1861.

                                  For more images of my visit to Fort Morgan, click here.

Photo journal: A day at Fort Morgan on Alabama's Gulf Coast

The main entrance to Fort Morgan notes the year the fortress was named.

Original plans for Fort Morgan.
(Library of Congress)

"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" Admiral David Farragut famously said after one vessel in his 18-ship fleet was sent to the bottom of Mobile Bay as the Union navy steamed past Fort Morgan on Aug. 5, 1864. Four days later, Union troops that included the 2nd Connecticut Light Artillery landed on the east side of Fort Morgan to begin a siege that ended with the Rebels' surrender on Aug. 23, 1864. The Confederates' commander was killed and the fort's barracks were so badly damaged that they were later torn down. (The wreck of the U.S.S. Tecumseh, the Union vessel sunk by a mine during Farragut's attack, lies in Mobile Bay today.) 

U.S. troops occupied Fort Morgan during the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II before it was deactivated in 1946 and turned over to the state of Alabama. I shot these images during an early-morning visit to Fort Morgan, 22 miles from Gulf Shores, Ala., on the Gulf Coast.

A living historian walks through the main entrance to Fort Morgan.

A visitor's shadow eerily appears on a wall of a casemate.

A tourist slips into the powder magazine, which held more than 60,000 pounds of powder during the
 Union navy's siege in August 1864.

Impressive brickwork in an inner area of the fort.

If necessary, fort defenders could  fire through the embrasures.

A view through an embrasure shows the "murder ditch," which could be vigorously defended
with cannon fire if an enemy  penetrated the fort's defenses.

The Confederate national flag flies near Fort Morgan's  museum, but for how long?

'Sad sight': Connecticut soldiers who died in each other's arms

2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery Corporal George Page was killed at the Battle of Cedar Creek.
(Don Serfass collection)

A state-issued marker for Page in Calhoun Cemetery in Cornwall, Conn.

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After the U.S. Army rapidly retreated, re-grouped and finally routed the Rebels at the Battle of Cedar Creek on Oct. 19, 1864, the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery aided its wounded and collected its dead. Among the 13 bodies found near a stone wall the next day were George W. Page, a 25-year-old corporal from Cornwall, and Charles Reed, a 19-year-old corporal from Salisbury.

JANUARY 2007: George Page's gravestone notes 
he was  "killed in the battle of Seder Creek."
(Find A Grave/Andrea Price-Johnson)

The two friends in Company G had crawled "quite a distance to each other from where they were hit," 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery Lieutenant Michael Kelly wrote, and comrades found them clasped in each other's arms.

"It was a sad sight," Kelly wrote about Page and Reed. "They were robed [sic] of all their effects... by the Rebs — shoes, Pants, blouse —- all that was any good was gone."

When a burial crew tossed Page and Reed into a trench with the rest of the regiment's dead, "many a rough and war worn veteran's face was washed with tears," assistant surgeon Judson B. Andrews noted, "as he turned away from so affecting a sight."

Page's remains were probably recovered and re-buried in Cornwall in Calhoun Cemetery, where he lies under a stone inscribed that he was killed at the battle of  "Seder Creek." 

During a recent visit, I found that marker face down in the grass, broken in two. A weather-worn, state-issued marker in front of the toppled gravestone memorializes the young soldier. Reed's final resting place may be in Town Hill Cemetery in Salisbury, Conn., although it's unclear if his remains were returned from Virginia.

JUNE 2015: Page's original marker, cracked and face down in the grass.

Corporal Charles Reed's marker in Town Hill Cemetery in Salisbury.

Charles Reed was only 19 when he died at the Battle of Cedar Creek.

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