Ft. Jefferson is losing the only battle it has ever fought.
No warship ever fired on the thick brick bulwarks. No swashbuckler ever dared swim the moat. The massive, magnificent citadel built a century and a half ago on an isolated spit of sand in the blue-green Gulf of Mexico is literally crumbling before its lone, inescapable enemy: nature.
A relentless siege of sea and wind is finally breaching walls once thought impregnable. The National Park Service considers one of Florida’s foremost historical treasures seriously threatened.
In the last few years, sections of brick have spilled from outer walls. Countless leaks erode interior mortar. Damage remains mostly cosmetic, but the structural strain is starting to show. Last year, a supporting arch caved in, forcing emergency repairs.
“Unless we turn things around in the next several years, we’re going to see what we’ve started to see increase in seriousness and frequency,” says Dick Ring, superintendent of Everglades and Dry Tortugas national parks. “We’ll reach the point where we have a collapse beyond repair.”
Because the Tortugas lie 70 miles west of Key West and are reachable only by seaplane or boat, fixing America’s largest Civil War-era fort poses numerous challenges. One looms especially large: Money. Or rather, the lack of it.
The park service’s repair efforts, budgeted for the last several years at between $150,000 and $200,000, haven’t kept pace with the deterioration, Ring says. The service estimates it could cost in excess of $15 million to “stabilize” the entire fort.
The service has requested additional money for years, Ring says, but the fort, for all its historic import, hasn’t proven a congressional priority in an era of skin-and-bones budgets.
Part of that has to do with its isolation. Although visitors have doubled to more than 50,000 in the last five years, Dry Tortugas still ranks among the least-accessible, least-visited parks.
The service, however, may soon have a new source of money. Six Homestead men, including the mayor and city attorney, plan to begin coaxing private donors to bankroll repairs.
As fishermen who have visited repeatedly over the years, they were spurred by the fort’s worsening shape, says Mike Watkins, Homestead city attorney and president of the new Ft. Jefferson Preservation Trust.
“We really love the fort and hate to see it crumble and fall the way it is,” Watkins says. “I have literally watched pieces of brick drop into the moat.”
The United States first conceived of Ft. Jefferson as part of a coastal defense system after the British ransacked cities in the War of 1812.
Military planners viewed the Tortugas–seven tiny sand and coral islands named by Spaniard Ponce de Leon in 1513–as key to controlling vital shipping routes. From here, American ships could confront foreign fleets or seek safety under the fort’s guns.
In 1846, U.S. Army Lt. Horatio Wright landed on Garden Key and began work on an unassailable battlement.
Plans were staggeringly ambitious, even by modern standards. The walls rise 50 feet and are thicker by a foot than Miami Heat center Alonzo Mourning is tall.
Its six-sided perimeter stretches more than a half-mile, encompassing 11 of the island’s 16 acres. Back-breaking work–largely by slave labor until the Civil War–would continue for 30 years without the fort ever actually being completed.
With an estimated 16 million bricks, it ranks as the largest all-brick structure in North America, says Tom McGrath, superintendent of the park service’s Historic Preservation Training Center in Maryland.
“In my view, it is one of the greatest feats of American engineering in the 19th Century to have built this massive fortification atop a sand atoll,” he says. “The labor represented is awesome and the craftsmanship is extraordinary. It is a cathedral to brick masonry.”
But if Ft. Jefferson was envisioned and for a time served as an unchallenged Gibraltar of the Gulf, it became best known as an Alcatraz.
The development of accurate, powerful rifled cannon that could pulverize the thickest brick walls made its design obsolete while it was still being built. During the Civil War, the Army turned it into a dank deserters’ prison.
The most famous resident was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set the broken leg John Wilkes Booth suffered fleeing from Ford’s Theatre after he assassinated Lincoln. Mudd, though claiming ignorance of the plot, was shipped to the Tortugas in 1865. He was pardoned four years later, partly for fighting a deadly yellow fever epidemic.
The Army abandoned the fort in 1873 after a hurricane. In 1934, it was established as a national monument and in 1992 it became the centerpiece of Dry Tortugas National Park, which extended protection to the superb reefs, which have drawn fishermen for generations, and bird populations that lure watchers worldwide.
The park service has done repairs, says Wayne Landrum, chief of operations for the Dry Tortugas, but “it’s always been kind of a shotgun approach.”
The largest project, rebuilding the outer “scarp,” the moat wall that protects the fort from surging waves, took place in the 1980s. In the last several years, crews of specially trained park service masons have visited in regular 12-week stints and have so far refinished most of the front facade. But elsewhere, McGrath says, “The fort is unraveling at an ever increasing rate.”
In Landrum’s four years at the fort, there have been four large “slides”–bricks spilling en masse into the moat.
Time and nature are the main threats, but the fort’s design also has contributed to its collapse.
The biggest problems have been iron shutters installed on the lower gun ports. Called Totten Embrasures–named for their designer, an admiral–they were then state-of-the-art protection for gun crews. The recoil of cannon automatically closed the shutters, which weigh some 600 pounds each.
A century-plus of salt spray has turned them into corroded hunks.
“They’re just like ice when it freezes,” Landrum says. “They expand.”
The swollen iron has caused most slides, pushing out brick. Numerous windows look ready to burst, the rust-stained bricks bulging from the walls. Part of the preservation plan involves removing the shutters.
Another period innovation–an intricate rainwater collection system leading to 109 cisterns below the fort–also backfired. The fort settled, cracking the foundation and letting sea water into the system almost immediately.
Now, it funnels water where it shouldn’t be–particularly, Landrum says, into employees’ living quarters. In some spots, stalagmites of hardened mortar have formed where leaks leached it from the bricks.
For now, there’s little danger of a big collapse. More than 2,000 arches give the fort incredible strength. Landrum even considers it the safest spot in South Florida to ride out a hurricane.
But the service believes long-term prospects are less stable. Wind and water have stripped much of the outside mortar. Brick slides also expose the coral and lime fill to weather damage.
Repairing the fort is daunting. Costs obviously soar, perhaps fourfold or more, because of the isolation. Everything, food to labor, has to be shipped in. A barge to carry bricks can run $1,000 a day alone.
The other problem is preserving the character of the fort, McGrath says.
Eventually, the entire fort will have to be painstakingly “repointed,” he says, a mason’s term for re-mortaring joints between each and every brick.
Although increasing visits from preservation crews would help, McGrath says, at some point, a large-scale effort will be necessary, probably involving trained private contractors.
“It’s going to need a major intervention. I think the time is now before it becomes a larger crisis.”
