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>> this original wsre presentation is made possible by viewers like you. thank you. >> it's a pentagonal structure, 21 1/2 million bricks strong. sitting at the entrance to pensacola bay it was built in the late 1820s in an effort to

defend the pensacola harbor. under union control it witnessed confederate aggression, fire, dissen tear and apatchy war leader and medicine man. it's fort pickens, if you happen to find yourself at the western tip of santa rosa island you'll discover it right in your own

backyard. ♪ pensacola f >> the bricks tell stories that span 180 plus years, named after american revolutionary war hero andrea pickens, took five years to build. you can wander through this

beautiful structure on your own or take a guided ranger tour as we did. let's go. >> without any further adieu we can get started. i would like to begin this afternoon by welcoming all of you here to gulf islands

national seashore and old fort pickens. my name is mike aymond, as a park ranger with the national park service this is one of the fun parts of my job, i get to the talk about the area, what makes it special, why was this set aside as one of ten national

seashores that run our country's coastline and one of over 409 national park areas now. this the largest of the national seashores and we extend about 160-miles along the northern gulf coast. what i have planned for you folks this afternoon is a tour

through the biggest and oldest of the forts still standing here at the western end of santa rosa island. everything on the island is different than what you'll find across the bay on the mainland, everything out here had to adapt to the wind, sun, salt spray and

overwash when hurricanes bring water over the island. in addition to this beautiful natural areas history abounds here and we have a dozen fortify cases here at the western end of santa rosa island, as i said we're the biggest and oldest. what prompted us to build the

forts along the shoreline, understand the forts, you have to go back to the last time we were invaded by a foreign navy and that's the big history quiz of the afternoon. when was the war of 1812? everyone gets it right. declared war in 1812, most

fighting occurred two years later in 1814. the british navy sailed up to the coast of america, burned down our brand new capitol, washington d.c. dolly madison first lady vonning through the white house taking pictures down off the wall to save what she

can when the navy british tried to get into baltimore harbor they couldn't get past the big brick fort. congress side this is what we need at every harbor entrance. with weal build the forts from maine to georgia in 1817. all the way down the east coast.

in 1817 they stopped in georgia though because florida was still spanish territory. it wasn't until four years later in 1821 that we paid spain $5 million for the whole florida territory. not a bad deal if you price the condos out here on the beach

today. a lot of coastline picked up, how do you patrol this territory? we need a navy yard right on the gulf coast and they pick ad a little point of land about a mile and a half northeast of us called tartar point.

the navy yard was established in 1825, spend a million dollars on a dry dock facility there and after navy yard was complete they began work on one of three forts on the entrance to the bay. that's the one we're in now, fort pickens was constructed

from 1829 to 1834 out of 21 1/2 million bricks making it one of the larger brick forts in the country. after they finished fort pickens they crossed the channel and built fort mcrea on now what's called perdido key and moveed to old spanish fort on the

mainland. they leveled one spanish fort and built fort barrancas on top of it. i there was one on the side they decided it was worth keeping and they connected the with a tunnel so you have two levels of guns there.

so three forts on the entrance to the bay, any ships sailening or out of the harbor has to pass under the cannons of all three forts, well defended but there's still one point of vulnerability and that's 700 yards north of fort barrancus, a hill andrew jackson put his cannons on when

he took the florida from the spanish once in 1814 and again in 1818. if we didn't fortify that hill somebody could do the same thing to us. they built the fourth fort on that hill and these two were designed to work together to

prevent a land ward attack on the navy yard so these are sound strategies, so sound that no one tried to get in. people say what a waste of time and money, the fort is empty, the entire history after spending owl that money and others say no the forts worked.

people knew they were here so they wouldn't try to come in and you can argue that back and forth all day, one of the ironies here is the only time these forts see combat was something they were never intended for and that's shooting each other across the bay in the

american civil war with a very unusual turn of events in this area, january of 1861 there's 50 soldiers across the bay from us at fort barrancus and the lieutenant left in charge from those men gets orders from washington d.c., they shadfly suceeded from the union, hold

all the forts. we have 50 men, four forts and navy yard, he gets 30 sailors loyal to the union but the 80 lactate situation and realize they can't hold all four forts. best bet is to take everything you can carry and ferry across the bay to fort pickens and get

this fort ready for defense. they maid made a wise move, sure enough confederate troops moved in took the navy yard, they advanced that forts but the 80 men at fort pickens refused to turn the fort over. they came out three times and demanded surrender of fort

pickens and they denied them each time. one of the men that came out was a man named chase and he supervised construction of the forts and when chase came out to demand secure ker the fort lieutenant slammer the man inside the fort said no we're

not going to let you in because we don't want you to see what we have done here in the fort and chase said i built the fort. i know it better than anyone. he said, but we changed thingsful he had taken the cannons pointed out in the gulf and turned them to point across

the bay but sure enough, they refused to turn the fort over and what they were doing is waiting for reinforcements to come in, men and supplies were landed ton south side of the island out of range of the confederate held forts across the bay making this one of the

few forts in the deep south that never fell from union control. so turned around north on the south side and south on the north side but they exchanged fire on a couple of occasions. we -- talk you can about that as we go through and the fort itself and how it changed over

the years it doesn't look like it did when first constructed. a good example would be this room, these are the officers quarters, these were really the nice escambia rooms in the fort. we would have had a marble mantel in the room originally. wooden floors over the openings.

four men in a room like this you can bring furniture from home if you were an officer so it wasn't too bad. if there's officers in the fort there's enlisted men. if we were here in 1861 and looked the the open field behind you we see 1100 men catched out,

that's where the enlisted men were housed out if what looked like canvas tepees called sibly tents, 15 to 20 in each tent, these were made for about ten men but they were packed out here and some accounts of the soldiers are or some of the best information we have they somehow

kept a sense of humor. heat exhaustion and dissen tear took its toll and these officers quarters were converted to dispensary without the 80 men on sick call for those ailments so even the officers didn't get the luxury of the nice quarters's when you have to remember that's

not what the fort was about it's a place to put cannons. we'll look at in a moment the case mates as well as on top of the fort what was called then barbettes. the fort had over 220 cannons in place, a full compliment of weapons and all the original

cannons with broken down for scrap and hauled off in the early 1900s so none of the cannons are original to it. we were slowly rearming it and we have a cannon like the one that would have been placed here in the 1840s around the corner before we leave this spot a

couple of things to mention, the fort was not built with safety in mind, so the floors are uneven, dark areas, low passage, please exercise caution as we head through. secondly if you get hot, tired told, sick or listening to me talk, feel free to drop out,ly

not be insulted but hopefully the next half hour or so you get better idea as to what the fort is all about. and finally if you have questions, feel free to ask ask up and i'll do my best to answer those for you. look at cannon around the corner

here. a cannon like this would have been placed here in the 1840s, this is called the 32-pounder smooth bore muzzle loading cannon. i will tell you what that means in just a moment. but we're going to talk about

the carriage that is seated on, the cannon is historic so from the 1840s waker quired it from another national park site. the carriage was manufactured about 12 years ago in washington so it's a reproduction. we sent the plans to these men, they sent us down a great

example of a seacoast carriage from the 1840s. before i go any further, i should let you know when this cannon was in place ready to be fired, the dumpster wasn't there, the brick building wasn't there, and the sea wall wasn't there and the outside the fort,

the ground was about eight feet lower than today so you would be looking right out on the pensacola bay from here. this old cannon the 32-pounder it's called that because that was the way the projectile, 32-pound cast iron ball, smooth bore first to the fact that

inside the barrel is just a smooth as the outside, there's no spiral grooves inside the barrel so no spin on the projectile and that's going to affect your range and accuracy tremendously. then muzzle loading simply means everything is going in from the

front the same way it's going out, there's no opening at the back or breach of the gun here. ideally a team of seven men on a cannon crew each has a specific job, we'll start with a batting gun powder one-fourth the weight of the projectile so for a 3 # pounder 8 pounds of gun powder

in a cloth bag u up to the muzzle of the gun pack into the end of the barrel with a rammer, on the end of a long pole like you see here. roll that cast iron ball and make sure it's up against the back of gun powder and then down here to the back of the gun

there was a small opening there that went down into the end of the barrel there are called the vent. one men on the cannon crew had a leather pouch on his waste waist, pull out a long pin and poke it down through the vent, put a hole and fill the vent

with more gun powder, on top of the vent he placed a metal tube, hollow tube with gun powder that had a wire perpendicularly through it, a friction primer, this thing can get fire to the powder in the barrel from there. on that wire was stuff like you find strike a match full mynated

mercury other chemicals and a loop around it and he will stand back olding the other end of the rope. captain i need help with sound effects many just a minute because they won't let me fire the cannon in here. the captain cannon crew climbs

on the carriage sites the gun using accurate siting devices. -- sighting devices, a notch here pretty much dead rac and look downing the barrel, when he's satisfied with the way the gun is aimed, the order is given to fire and the man holding that rope turns his face so sparks

don't fly into it and gives the lanyard a tug and that causes that wire to exit the tube creating a spark as it does the gun powder down the and boom. there goes that 32-pound cast iron ball hurdle ling forth a mile maybe a mile and a half and in the general direction the

gunpointed, i say generally because these weretoriously inaccurate -- were notoriously wild weapons. again kind of a knuckle ball effect and that grew distance so a range mile and a half, effective range just under a mile.

you can send a cannon ball over to fort barrancus across the way, a mile away but to do any damage to it it would have to be just under a mile, 6,000 rounds were exchanged in two days november 22nd and 23rd, very little damage done to either fort.

>> park ranger mike aymonds tells us four of the five sides face the water. only the east side is accessible by land but it needed defending as well. >> low passage here, please watch your head. we're on the only side of the

fort that can be attacked by land and land ward attack has to to come from the east the way most of you came in today unless you arrived by boat. there's an enemy coming from the east the first thing you'll be faced with men was rifled musket as awe along the shoulder high

wall firing back at them as they approach. if the men along the wall feel like they're losing ground, they come down these stairs behind me, upstairs in through these doorways we're using today, the idea is the get your men back into the fort and let the enemy

come on down into the dry motor ditch. this is a bad place to end up. you're going to be fired upon from both sides, small cannons called were mounted inside the openings and they fired a can with 48 cast iron balls and into -- inch diameter so like a buck

shot large version and they had a spray grow going with a cross fire cutting down anyone trying to get to the main walls of the this made sense to me when i first heard it but i did have a question, how do you keep from shooting into each other's gun ports?

they're right across from each other. that was answered well by the fact this area has seen considerable change, something i alluded to when we were at the cannon fact the ground was eight feet lower outside the fort than it is today.

what happened? 1906 hurricane swept over the the army is out here using this end for coast defense. they said we need more protection and built a massive sea wall around this end of the island. about four fight across on the top, ten across at the bottom.

huge concrete sea wall, they brought the men back out started working inside the sea wall, they started dropping out from the heat, not a breeze stirred over that wall. we'll raise everything inside the sea wall up to the height fort pickens parade and you

always took a bridge up into the fort and stairs up through these doorways so they filled in and to give an idea how much sand they put in around this end of the island by the sea wall, just as many stairs below the sand as you see up above so those two flights meet at a v at the

bottom. the openings you see here for the cannons are halfway up the wall so there's just as much brick work below each one as above it. so you can see the fort is buried by all that fill and they would have been pointing the

cannons down to the dry motor ditch thigh didn't have to worry about firing into each other's gun ports. let's head back to the fort. we have original flooring down the hallway here, please watch your step, it settled a bit over the years.

>> a nice thing to experience is sights sounds and smells within the walls. it's cool and damp in here even in the summer. >> this was a row of officers quarters at one time, these are rooms we believe the apaches lived in in when they were held

as prisoners of war. the story begins with geronimo's third and final surrender in arizona. he left the reservation with a hundred men women and children, 5,000 kvaalry troop chasing him approximate his band back and forth across the mexican border

and they couldn't capture hill, they realizedded the best bet to hire apaches to talk to him and convince him to come down and engage in talks as it would be in his best interest. they somehow convinced him to do so, he came down and met with general miles at skeleton

canyon, he was offered terms of surrender, one of those was he wouldn't be hung, secondly he would be reunited with with his family according to records geronimo agreed those, came down to fort boe, arizona. there was a train waiting for him, the rest of the apaches

were taken over to saint augustine, florida. it was called fort marion in the 1880 et cetera being used as big prison, with over 400 individuals locked up built for about 250 so it was crowded over and that's where geronnimo was headed on the train.

when pensacola pensacolaans heard about him coming through, every time ta train stopped hundreds would come to see the famous apache warrior and medicine man. they wrote a letter to the pensacola, president one of the quote better place for great

american general to wander through old fort and consider misdeeds of the past. they wanted to take some apaches off the train and bring them to fort pickens. they received permission to take 15 men brought them by boat across the bay, moved the open

ended case mates on the west side of the fort, finally the wives and children were brought over from saint augustine and when the families with were reunited here they moved into these officers quarters on the south side, these would have ben the nicest rooms in the

fort at the time. he had fireplace for winter a breeze off the gulf in the summer, they were locked in the rooms very much prisoners on an island a long way from arizona but after a month and a half here the apaches were moved to mount vernon, alabama, that's

knot of mobile, there were there seven -- of mobile. for seven years, finally to okaloosa geronimo died in 1909. >> there are no flat ceilings in the fort. it's constructed using a series of arches designed by joseph cotton who was with the u.s.

army corps of engineers. the whole entire system of forts was overseen by a fort expert from europe. a man named simone bernard who was in fact part of napoleon's army. >> the bricks were brought in from the orthoend of pensacola

bay, $10 per thousand put together with mortar consisting of lime mixed with a little sand and water, it made a good mortar but over the years the rain trickling down between the cracks in the bricks will cause the lime in the mortar to leech out.

you see a stalagtites a flow formation on the side, these are common in a cave or cavern, that's a result of lime and mortar leaching out. we see that mortar leaching out korean the cracks in the brick, we're glad they built the fort out of connecting arches.

it's a strong structural form the bring leaning against the other holds the amp together. we hope that he holds true above you sir where there's no more left between cracks an bricks. been lucky so far, haven't lost anyone on a tour in a while so we should be fine today.

so you have all this weight above us, brick work, earth work on top of that, cast iron cans on top of that, all that bearing down on this arch, over this arch into the peers on either side which cause the fort to sink and settle were the weight not redistributed through the

reverse arch which keeps the fort from sinking in the soft sand here. one big irony here when talking construction of the fort is the fort was built to protect americans freedom by men that would never see freedom themselves so when slaved men

built the fort, 400 men put it together over five years out of 21 1/2 million bricks under the supervision of the u.s. army corps of engineers and ironically the only time the fort would see warfare was the war that ended slavery as an institution in the united

states. i often say the fort is a monument to the men that built and we don't even know their names because they were treated as property instead of people. civil war period here was the most active time. the first 18 months of the civil

war, that's when you had 1100 men camped in the center of the fort here and they're out here with their full uniforms buttoned to the top button at all times while on duty moving cannons around stacking cannon balls getting hot and thirsty, thirsty is a problem, there' no

drinkable water on the island. but they built a system into the fort which rain water could be collected and rain would fall on top of the fort trickle down through the earth piled over the arches an drain directly into the cisterns of water storage areas so that was they were

freshwater supply and from all accounts they worked really pretty well until they really needed them, in 1861, when all the men were here they went four months with hardly a drop of rain. so the water in the cisterns got lower and lower and it stagnated

and dysentery broke out rampant out hearing one treatment for dysentery in 1861 was a teaspoon of the terpentine every morning. what killed people more the dysentery or the cure, but water was the biggest killer more so than combat. >> a wooden ship under smooth

war power with cannon on the deck, a fort like this could stop an attack from a ship like that. by the time the forts were used in the american civil war when that conflict was over all these forts were built on the shorelines were obsolete.

rifled cannons came into use and those rifled guns could hit the same place over an over an knock a hole through a four food solid brick wall. that's what the union army did at fort polaski outside savannah, georgia, they brought the rifled guns to bare on that

fort, sat out of range of the confederate guns because the rifle guns had a greater range and u just start firing away, knock ad hole through the four food solid brick wall, the next thing is gun powder storage and before that happens the flag of surrender goes up, all the forts

within obsolete. we need ad new type of fort. this is what they came up with, battery pensacola. it lacks the graceful architecture of the old brick forts with its sweeping arches, this is 1890s battery pensacola, fort pickens had over

220 cannons, battery pensacola only had two. one up top on either side there but the gun pyred 1,070-pound projectile eight miles out into the gulf very accurately so the shifted gun away from the forts and into the artillery itself. >> when battery pensacola was

built in the 1890s a fire broke out in the brick portion of fort pickens where construction supplies were stored. >> passing buckets of water from the cistern t fire kept spreading the commanding officer saw where the fire was headed,

formed his men up in the center of the fort, marred them right out through that arched entranceway and down the island to the east. because the fire was moving into the gun powder storage when there was 8,000 pounds of high explosives.

it reached that room and blew the entire corner off the fort. bricks went through people's rooms in warrington a mile and a half across the bay at 5 in the morning. rude awakening for those folks bricks coming through the ceiling, which is why we no

longer have a five sided fort, four sides with a big gap where they accidently blew the corner off june 20th of 1899. that's how fort pickens got its bay window. it became a state park in 1947 and in 1971 it became part of newly formed gulf islands

national seashore, our goal is in the other 408 national park sites is to hold on to what we have been entrusted with whether our cultural heritage, our country can defended itself in its earliest years, natural heritage, these beautiful barrier island beaches that

haven't and won't with be developed. that's the idea mind the parks. i appreciate you taking the time out of your day to join me. thank you for coming out. it's been a pleasure. [applause] >> to get to fort pickens by

lan, take highway 399 south on to pensacola beach. then take fort pickens road west to the ranger station, pay toll and continue about sen miles until it dead ends into the if traveling by boat just motor to the northwest end of santa rosa island and anchor along the

shore. we hope you have enjoyed this historic look at fort pickens. one of the mightiest forts to ever protect pensacola bay. we'll see you again next time right in your own backyard. ♪