It's barely visible from the city, though, built on a sandbar at the mouth of the harbor, where, as the locals say, "the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet to form the Atlantic Ocean." (In case you're wondering, that's the Ashley on the right and the Cooper on the left. Fort Sumter is the little patch of land just to the right of the radio antenna.)
Even with a telephoto lens you can't make out much from the city's waterfront. But we thought we could see a U.S. flag defiantly flying:
And as we approached on the ferry, there was no question that that's what it was:
But wait a minute: that's a peculiar version of the flag:
It turned out that the flag was not a generic symbol of the damn Yankees, er, victorious Union government, but rather a replica of the 33-star flag that flew over the fort in the days before it was attacked, which was flying as part of the re-enactment marking the war's anniversary. The real thing is inside the fort's museum:
Other than the museum, there's not that much to see. The fort was pretty much destroyed during the war -- not by the initial Confederate attack (the tiny Union garrison, unprepared for a siege, surrendered rather quickly), but by a Union counterattack near the end of the war that took more than a year to drive out the Confederate defenders.
On top of the ruined fort was built a 20th century-style coastal defense battery, which now houses the museum but otherwise holds no interest to most visitors:
The most interesting part of the Fort Sumter story, to me anyway, wasn't in the fort at all, but at the Edmonston-Alston House, one of the grand mansions on the city's waterfront. It was here, from this balcony, that General Beauregard, the Confederate commander, watched the initial attack on Fort Sumter:
And this, minus the palmettos (which were planted well after the war), is what he saw:
He must have had a good telescope.
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