Author’s note: This is the last in a series of articles exploring the coastal outposts that once surrounded greater New Orleans, principally along the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain. In previous months we looked at West End, Spanish Fort and Milneburg, as well as eastern New Orleans and Bucktown. Today we examine the old military forts of our coastal perimeter.
They stand stoically along our coastlines and riverbanks, obsolete sentinels of a bygone era. They lean and crack in the face of weather and waves, some enveloped in vegetation, others tumbled in ruin.
They are our region’s historic forts and batteries — brick-and-mortar masterpieces of military engineering, with names like Pike, Macomb, Bienvenue, Dupré, Proctor, St. Philip, Jackson and Livingston, among others.
This decade marks 200 years since the start of a concerted effort to build them, a project that became known as the “Third System” of national defenses.
The name came from the strategic rethinking of defensive infrastructure following the American Revolution.
Fresh from years of improvised war tactics, officers of the new nation’s armed forces came to appreciate the importance of military science and planning, and realized that engineers and architects would have to collaborate with soldiers and artillerists in future conflicts. They consulted with French advisers with an eye toward building a network of forts, armories and depots at key strategic sites along coasts and rivers — an integral system, not just a smattering of assets.
Launched in 1794, this “First System” of forts saw limited funding and localized oversight, leading to “irregular and … inadequate” results, according to historian Ian C. Hope. One European adviser in 1799 derided the primitive earthworks and timber stockades of the First System as “either good for nothing or at least defective, so that money spent (on them) … may be said to be thrown away.”
The effort did, however, help launch West Point in 1802 as the nation’s premier military academy and engineering school. To this day, the federal government’s chief engineering body is a military department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Our region’s historic forts and batteries stand stoically along our coastlines and riverbanks, obsolete sentinels of a bygone era. They lean a…
Reinforcing and redesigning
In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson, concerned about foreign threats and keen on expansion into the lands of the Louisiana Purchase, pushed for the construction of an improved network of permanent masonry coastal and interior forts. This “Second System,” guided by newly minted American engineers rather than European advisers, yielded over 60 fortifications of various types and sizes, built mostly from 1808 to 1812.
In our region, the Americans upgraded the old Spanish colonial Fortaleza San Felipe (also formerly the French colonial Fort Plaquemine) as Fort St. Philip, on the east bank of lower Plaquemines Parish near the mouth of the Mississippi. They also rebuilt Fort St. Leon at English Turn, and Fuerte San Juan at the mouth of Bayou St. John, becoming Fort St. John (today’s Spanish Fort).
Within the boundaries of Orleans Parish, the shores of Lake Pontchartrain were once dotted with small coastal communities: West End, Spanish F…
Then came the War of 1812, the British attacks on Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and the culminating Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, all of which evidenced the need for even better coastal defenses.
In 1817, President James Monroe conceived what would later be known as the “Third System,” described by Hope as “a broader defense strategy (of) fortified frontiers connected to a system of mobilization … that would allow state-sponsored militias to respond adequately to any maritime threat.”
Launched in 1820, the Third System featured the latest thinking on fort design and construction materials. It also placed new emphasis on what Secretary of War John C. Calhoun described as the nation’s “southern … frontier of the Gulf of Mexico,” namely the labyrinthine bayous and marshes surrounding the critical port city of New Orleans.
It was during this era, from the 1820s to the 1850s, when our regional bastions were built or rebuilt to the highest standards of the day. Their locations offer clues about navigable waterways in the early 1800s, pinpointing strategic spots along ingresses of various widths and depths.
Some were prominent positions that had been fortified since colonial times. Near the mouth of the Mississippi, for example, engineers began work at Fort Jackson starting in 1822, and gave the older Fort St. Philip across the river an upgrade in the 1840s.
Author’s note: This is part of a series exploring the various historic coastal communities that once surrounded greater New Orleans, principal…
At Rigolets Pass, where entry to Lake Pontchartrain could be gained from Lake Borgne and the Mississippi Sound, engineers replaced the primitive Fort Petit Coquilles, dating to 1813, with a massive new crescent-shaped bastion completed in 1824 and renamed Fort Pike in 1827.
The other lake gateway, Chef Menteur Pass, got a similarly designed citadel between 1821 and 1828. Originally called Fort Chef Menteur, it was renamed Fort Wood in 1835 and Fort Macomb in 1851.
Armoring the periphery
With its militarization of the coastal periphery, the Third System obviated the need for that older generation of inner redoubts closer to New Orleans. Authorities abandoned Fort St. Leon at English Turn as well as Fort St. John at Bayou St. John, which later came into private hands and gradually was transformed into the recreational destination known as Spanish Fort.
They also relinquished Fort St. Charles, the last of the five colonial-era bastions that once surrounded the French Quarter. The site, cleared in 1821, became the home of today’s Old U.S. Mint, built in 1835, as well as the traffic lanes of Esplanade Avenue at the North Peters Street intersection.
Also in 1835, the U.S. military constructed New Orleans Barracks in the lowermost corner of Orleans Parish, in today’s Lower 9th Ward, and erected four armed corner towers to defend it. Later renamed Jackson Barracks, the installation today retains two towers and most of its original barracks, now home to the Louisiana National Guard.
The Third System went further than previous efforts in fortifying vulnerable spots, no matter how remote or secluded. Its engineers built Battery Bienvenue in 1835 where Bayou Bienvenue outflows into Lake Borgne, which the British had used to invade 20 years earlier. They added Tower Dupré, sometimes referred to as Martello Tower, in 1840 and Proctor’s Tower, or Fort Beauregard, in 1856 to guard the lake’s southern shore, which could be used to gain access to Bayou Yscloskey and Bayou Terre aux Boeuf and attack the city from St. Bernard Parish.
To the south, the Barataria Basin offered a particularly stealthy entree into the flanks of the metropolis, as evidenced by the rampant smuggling activity in this region. To guard the basin’s gateway at Barataria Pass, engineers erected Fort Livingston in 1840 on Grande Terre Island — not coincidentally the former base camp of the pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte and their “hellish banditti,” as Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson called them, and very nearly a British invasion foothold had not the Americans raided it in 1814.
A similarly strategic isle to the east, Ship Island, so named for its valuable deep harbor near the otherwise shallow Mississippi Gulf Coast, became the site of one of the last Third System projects, Fort Massachusetts, started in 1859.
By 1860, according to the late military historian Frederic Codman Parkerson, New Orleans ranked as “America’s most fortified city.”
An unforeseen enemy
But all that planning for an external threat failed to foresee that a terrible conflict would instead brew from within. In the winter of 1860-61, Southern states began seceding from the Union and joining the Confederacy. In April, rebels in South Carolina bombarded the Third System bastion of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and the Civil War ensued.
Union forces moved to suppress the rebellion, starting with a blockade of Southern ports. This strategy put New Orleans in the crosshairs, and its Third System forts in precisely the role for which they were designed — except with their own builders as combatants.
Confederates seized each fort and, not knowing from where the Union might attack New Orleans, erected additional interior defenses. The biggest was Camp Parapet in Jefferson Parish, where present-day Causeway Boulevard meets River Road, followed by positions on Bayou St. John, the Pontchartrain Railroad on what is now Elysian Fields Avenue, in lower Algiers and along the Company Canal in present-day Westwego.
Because of scant resources and sheer urgency, however, these Confederate fortifications ended up looking more like those early First System efforts — primitive, lightly armed earthworks.
As for the Third System forts, some would see the threat of war, or minor action. The only two in our region that saw large-scale combat were Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, which engaged in an extended naval battle with Admiral David Farragut’s Union invasion fleet in April 1862.
After a climactic nocturnal exchange of fire, the Union warships slipped past the twin bastions and made their way upriver to New Orleans. Federal troops would occupy the city and river parishes for the remainder of the war.
The occupation returned the region’s Third System forts to Union control, and Northern soldiers completed those still unfinished, such as Fort Massachusetts and Proctor’s Tower. The interruption left its mark: To this day, Fort Massachusetts has two distinct colors in its brickwork, the brown portions made from local clay available before and after the war, and the red portions using bricks imported from Maine during the war.
What eventually ended the Third System era was not an enemy attack or internal division, but technology and changing geopolitics. Advances in artillery, in the form of rifled barrels and high-caliber smooth-bore cannon, brought deadly accuracy and concentrated force to shots fired at walls of brick and mortar, potentially smashing them. State-of-the-art architecture of the 1820s had given way to state-of-the-science artillery of the 1860s.
Moreover, the threat of coastal invasions had diminished, as Europe's old colonial powers gradually withdrew from their Western Hemispheric interests. The likelihood of overseas engagements, meanwhile, increased, and that called for investment in ships, not domestic forts.
The Third System officially ended in 1867, 50 years after its inception, and for the next 30 years, military planners didn’t quite know what to do with the forts. Most were erratically funded, partially manned and lightly armed; some served as garrisons or outposts for civilian government projects, and still others were turned over to state, parish or private ownership.
A final act
But in the late 1890s, the old threat briefly came back to life. U.S. relations deteriorated with Spain over imperial interests. American military planners once again focused on coastal vulnerability, upgrading selected Third System forts with steel shields and modern artillery.
Forts Jackson and St. Philip got new batteries and hydraulically mounted guns, as well as mines in the Mississippi River. They became “better armed than (they) had been in many years,” according to historian Jerome A. Greene, author of a 1982 government study.
Other local forts, however, were deemed unlikely targets, and were never remilitarized.
When the two nations went to war in 1898, the action played out entirely offshore and ended in a decisive American victory. The upgraded defenses once again went unused, after which the U.S. further divested itself of the old forts.
World Wars I and II brought renewed military attention to the Gulf Coast, but with a few minor exceptions, most of it went not to forts but to naval and aerial hunting of German submarines.
By the end of the Second World War, the Third System forts became permanently obsolete. In subtropical Louisiana, deterioration set in. Hurricanes battered them. Subsidence sank them. Erosion exposed them. Summer downpours and winter freezes cracked their walls, and vegetation wedged them apart. Vandals and treasure hunters carted away souvenir bricks and anything made of iron.
Only those forts that gained protection as historic sites got some level of maintenance, such as Fort Jackson (a Plaquemines Parish park), Fort Pike (a Louisiana State Historic Site) and Fort Massachusetts (part of the U.S. National Park Service’s Gulf Islands National Seashore).
But limited funding and ever-worsening environmental conditions have put in question whether even those Third System forts will see a third century. Visitors are no longer able to enter Fort Jackson, for safety reasons, and Fort Pike, a unique visitor experience in a city replete with historic buildings, has been closed for budgetary reasons since 2015, though State Parks officials hope to reopen it soon on a limited basis.
Other old bastions, such as Fort Macomb and Fort St. Philip, look like Mayan ruins. Fort Proctor resembles an island-castle from another world, while rising seas encroach further upon Fort Livingston. Remote Battery Bienvenue looks more like a marsh thicket than an engineered structure, and Tower Dupré is literally an island — of scattered bricks and fallen walls.
Richard Campanella, a geographer with the Tulane School of Architecture, is the author of “Bourbon Street: A History,” “Bienville’s Dilemma” and “Cityscapes of New Orleans.” His next book, “The West Bank of Greater New Orleans: A Historical Geography” (LSU Press), is due out in May 2020. Campanella may be reached at email@example.com, http://richcampanella.com, or @nolacampanella on Twitter.