Yesterday we went off in search of a bit more history--Forts Sumter and Moultrie. We all know about Fort Sumter as the starting place for the Civil War, so it seemed that a visit to see what is left was in order. It is a National Monument and reachable only by boat. We don't have our own boat so we had to take the tour boat (the kayak doesn't count, it's a couple of miles offshore).
It was a pretty good motorcycle ride, about 25 miles, from the campground to Patriot's Point just this side of the Cooper River across from Charleston. All highway, with only a few miles of construction traffic in Mount Pleasant, near the city. The stop'n'go traffic is a bit hard on Ellen's clutching hand.
We stopped at the See-Wee Visitor Center on the way in. It is the visitor center for the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. We just stopped to pick up maps, brochures and bird lists, but it has an interesting nature trail and a raptor refuge just down the road, so a return visit is planned.
Unfortunately, there is only a single tour boat per day from Patriot's Point (which also has the USS Yorktown and a couple of other ships as a museum--we passed on that). The single tour is at 1:30PM. We arrived a bit early and had a 45 minute wait and had a ghastly lunch. The tour is about two hours total, so it was a long afternoon.
Fort Sumter was built before the Civil War and was pretty much reduced to rubble by the Union during the war. It was partially rebuilt after the war and modernized during the Spanish-American war with a large concrete structure in the center of the fort. Only a single story of the original outside walls have been excavated and what remains is pretty impressive. It was a masonry fort and became obsolete during the Civil War with the advent of the rifled cannon, which tore through the brickwork easily. There are several places where rounds are still embedded in the wall and these walls were several feet thick.
Aside from the black modern monolithic structure in the middle of the fort, none of the original quarters remain, but many of the guns from the early period have been preserved, several large enough for a child or smaller person (like Ellen) to crawl into. This evidently been tried enough that the ranger specifically warned against it, too many people got stuck.
After a tour around the fort, a stroll through the museum (which is devoted to the history of the fort and contains the original Union and Confederate South Carolina flags which flew over the fort) and a trip through the bookstore for a book and the requisite passport stamps, it was back on the boat for the trip back to the mainland.
Next stop Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island just across from Fort Sumter. It is also a part of the Fort Sumter National Monument, but has a longer history dating from the Revolution when it defended Charleston Harbor from the British fleet. The first two incarnations of the fort do not remain, but the Civil War era through the Second World War fortifications are represented in the current monument.
The basic outline of the fort was maintained from the early-1800's onward. Unlike Fort Sumter, the Confederates basically buried the fort in sand during the war and it did not suffer the fate of total destruction. The Park Service has done a restoration where each section of the water facing walls has been restored to a different period, pre-Civil War, Civil War, Post-war, Spanish-American War and WWII.
Ellen twinged her back yesterday, so we decided to take today off and just let it recover even though it was a nice day, reaching the 70's. While she relaxed, I put my mountain bike together and went off for a ride along one of the nearby back roads, the Old Georgetown Road. It started off paved, turned to packed sand, which was hardly different from the paved road, but then turned to recently graded sand, which was a whole different story--kind of like riding through just setting concrete, five miles of it. I got back to the highway at the next opportunity and rode back to the campground, to windward of course. It was good exercise anyway.
As I was eating lunch, a loud hiss emanated from my rear tire. The tube had failed right at the valve. Fortunately, it waited until I got back to camp. Also fortunately, I had a spare tube. Unfortunately, I tweaked my back changing the tube. Now there are two of us with bad backs. It seems they are just muscular for each of us. Ellen is feeling a bit better already. I hope that I recover equally quickly and we can continue sightseeing.
We've extended or reservation here through next Tuesday night as there is much still to see. We'd like to get into Charleston, see Drayton Hall, go up to Pawley's Island and the sculpture garden at Brookgreen Gardens, take a hike or two and, maybe, get out the kayak for a little paddle on the Intracoastal Waterway. Think we're being optimistic??
Photos soon.
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