Fort Gaines & the Battle of Mobile Bay | History Traveler Episode 164

[Music] all right well right now i am on vacation and as you can see i am situated near a very large body of salt water and right now you may be thinking to yourself oh wow jd that is so awesome i'm so envious you get to spend some time at the beach well it turns out that i actually hate the beach unless it's omaha beach to me this place here offers nothing but sand and heat stroke and sun poisoning but there is a lot of history in the area where i'm at so today we are going to venture out and we are going to visit a location that was the site of one of the biggest naval battles in the civil war [Music] all right well right now i am on dolphin island at the mouth of mobile bay and during the civil war this was a location of great strategic importance to both the confederacy and the union the confederacy uh had mobile bay blocked off they had had laid mines which then were called torpedoes across the bay and bracketing either side of mobile bay was fort gaines to the west and fort morgan to the east well in 1864 the union started devising a plan to try and open up mobile bay what they were going to do is there was going to be a joint operation between the army and the navy where army forces would be landed on the islands surrounding the forts and would advance over land while the navy under the leadership of abro farragut would try and open up mobile bay from the sea all right and right now we are headed right up to fort gaines [Music] all right well here is our first look at fort gaines as we are approaching from the the west here on dauphin island now on the 3rd of august in 1864 the union forces under the leadership of general gordon granger would have landed about 10 miles off in that direction would have made an amphibious landing before daylight and then would have advanced to within sight of fort gaines here and then they started digging in there was a little bit of shelling that was going on back and forth uh casualties were pretty light some skirmish fire on on both sides uh but by the fourth uh they were within a half mile of the fort and had started entrenching for a siege of the fort all right we're gonna go ahead and go inside now [Music] all right getting ready to go into historic fort gaines uh which was established in 1821 as it says here on the science site of the battle of mobile bay and of course probably the most well-known figure from the battle of mobile bay was david farragut uh whose famous phrase is emblazoned there on the sign we're going to talk more about farragut in a later episode and the naval actions here but as for now as i've already said a few times already we're going to go ahead and go inside [Music] quick side note this is just pretty dang cool this is the keel section of a ship whose remains washed ashore after hurricane george in 1998 and they have it out on display here nothing is known about the ship but it's hypothesized that it was from sometime in maybe the early 1800s or earlier yeah very interesting [Music] all right well we just made it here inside of fort gaines and man uh this place is some kind of cool uh just a a quick history about fort gaines after the war of 1812 the us realized that they were in dire need of some protection along their coasts and uh decided to build a fort right here on dolphin island which had previously been known as massacre island because the guy who first discovered it found a whole bunch of human bones but that was kind of an unpleasant name so they changed to dolphin island well whenever they were trying to establish a fort here they kept having problems with it being built built too close to the water line they kept having problems with flooding and in the 1850s well they started building this fort which you see here today now by 1860 1861 it was finishing up the civil war starts the confederates took over and they are the ones who who did the finishing work here at fort gaines all right so uh we're going to take a look around here and see how the confederates that operated this fort would have lived all right what we are looking at right now is the gun ramp or one of the gun ramps uh here at fort gaines as you can see it is constructed from brick and would have been used by both soldiers and by ammunition carts in order to get the guns and ammunition up here to the to the gun platform so once you're up here on the gun platform we'll take a look at this they have all kinds of well preserved gun mounts that are on these track supports right here this was so that the guns could be traversed to fire out into different positions this one right here is facing west so the the union men who would have been approaching would have come up against these guns right here but uh yeah pretty cool i've jumped up here a little bit just to show these gun mounts from a different position and also this serpentine brick wall so this the serpentine wall was to protect the guns and also the crew and then if we go over here well this is the south flank firing position so whenever i first was approaching the fort i was right out over here so this these positions here would have been occupied by 32 pound guns and this is pretty interesting if you look let me move down here a little bit if you look right here well here's a spot that was hit during the battle of mobile bay from the uss chickasaw and i'll bet you the old boy who was manning this gun about evacuated his bowels whenever that thing hit [Music] all right touching a little bit now on what the lifestyle of the confederates who would have been here at fort gaines might have looked like this is the officer's kitchen area so if we go inside we'll go in this one right here adjust our lighting a little bit as we go so here you can see that you know there are different ovens places for food preparation there's another oven right up here so they would start their fire and then rake the coals to the side and then have that for cooking food and if we go back outside well this capped off concrete thing here as you can see by that sign is a cistern so that would be used for collecting fresh drinking water and also water that can be used in cooking [Music] the spot that i'm approaching now is the east bastion of fort gaines and it's from this position here that you can really get a commanding view of mobile bay so it might be a little bit difficult to see let's see if i can zoom in yeah they're on the horizon so right there well that is where fort morgan is and in august of 1863 there would have been quite the naval fight occurring out here in front of us between admiral farragut and the confederate navy the tecumseh was sank out there uh we're going to tackle that a little bit more in depth in a later episode but yeah this is this is the view of mobile bay from the east bastion of fort gaines so if fort gaines is shaped like a pentagon which it is this is this is at the the eastern tip of it okay moving off of the east bastion and uh going down into a hole and to be right honest i don't even know what it is that i'm going down into right now all i know is that i don't want to fall and oh dang whenever i said we were going down into a hole i wasn't even kidding oh little hole all right oh gosh dang it ah crawling in through what is obviously a tiny little hole and holy smokes this actually looks pretty cool i think the brochure i was reading earlier i think they said that this spot underneath the east bastion around the turn of the century whenever they were updating the fort was uh was filled up with sand and would have originally been an ammunition storeroom but uh yeah there obviously as you can see if i try and stand up yeah there's where it hits so not a lot of room in here but anyway the civil war period this would have been the ammunition store room [Music] i do want to make quick mention of something if you'll notice this part of the fort looks way different than the other parts of the fort you can see that this is a concrete gun mount for a disappearing gun this fort was updated in the turn of the century during the the endicott period i've done a couple other videos on endicott era fortifications specifically up in maine i'm really focusing more on the civil war side of things for this video but i did want to make mention that this fort was updated at different points during its existence all right found ourselves another hole here and it's got a low spot good grief i adjust my lighting so that we can actually see what we are getting into okay and oh my interesting this looks like something out of dracula's castle and oh dang well i won't lie i don't know exactly what i'm looking at but it sure does look cool interesting all right so i i think what we are in here is the ammunition room uh on the southwest corner of fort gaines and uh you can see let me just point back here they have uh some some ports for 24 pound cannon there would have been looks like four in here uh also places for shooting rifles and then there's this actually kind of a dang cool looking tunnel uh that that leads into here uh hey funny story by the way uh in my andersonville video i had a whole bunch of people that were flipping out because they saw a shadow in the crack of a door and were completely pumped because i had caught you know a civil war ghost on film well actually have ran into our civil war ghost again yeah it's it was actually my son so sorry for all you paranormal enthusiasts i hate to disappoint you it was just my boy getting in my shot [Music] all right another lifestyle structure here at the fort there's a couple different things going on here but on the left this is the bakery okay now inside of the bakery and this is this is like the biggest bakery oven i've ever seen in my life so the way that this would work is you would build your fire inside of the oven that's going to heat up the bricks you'd let it burn down to the ashes and then the soldiers would rake out the ashes because nobody likes ashy bread and uh then you would put your bread dough in there close these metal doors so that the radiant heat from the bricks wouldn't escape and then yeah have some fresh bread for the garrison and i'm going to be honest i don't know what this is over here um if it's like a a bread pan for kneading dough like that's the biggest bread pan i've ever seen either that it's a giant walk maybe the people here at fort gaines really liked you know stir fry [Music] all right now of course no proper home tour would be complete without a look at the bathroom so this is the latrine here at fort gaines and as you can see it is custom designed for people who are maybe i guess you could say a little more social so you can sit here and chat and knock out two birds with one stone by the way if you're wondering how these facilities were kept clean and sanitary well each one of these 10 holes would lead to a culvert that went out to the sea and would get washed out with the the tide there at mobile bay okay so i'm back out front here there's the bakery there in the middle is the latrine and then here on the right uh this would have been a blacksmith shop that would have served the garrison and they have this closed off so i can't go inside but we can maybe get up here to the window and take a little peek in here so yeah bread toilets and a blacksmith shop everything that you would ever need here at fort gaines plus lots of guns okay so there's some of the day-to-day facilities that would have been present here at fort gaines uh so we're going to kind of wrap things up here but there is one more thing that they have here at the fort that i really want to show look at this monstrosity this is the actual anchor from the uss hartford which would have been admiral farragut's flagship during the battle of mobile bay in august of 1864. this thing is huge i never cease to be amazed by just the size of some of these things and thinking that people actually made it that is amazing and then up here they have again reminding you of farragut's famous words during the battle of mobile bay so here was the fate of fort gaines during the battle of mobile bay on august 6th the union ground forces brought in a couple of 30-pound parrot rifles and i think four 12-pound rifles to lay siege to the fort there were some union gun boats that that sailed up and started lobbing shells into the fort well the next day on the seventh uh anderson who was the garrison commander here at fort gaines asked farragut for terms of surrender and the next day farragut accepted the unconditional surrender of the confederate forces here all of the confederates which i think numbered eight or 900 uh ended up being shipped over to new orleans and became prisoners of war of the union army but anyway that was fort gaines pretty amazing place uh and a lot of history uh right here on dauphin island but as for right now i think we're going to jump on a ferry and head over to fort morgan [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 36,610

Keywords: history, history travel, history traveler, history underground, civil war, civil war naval battles, civil war navy, battle of mobile bay, damn the torpedoes, fort gaines, dauphin island, alabama, ft gaines, old forts, historic forts, civil war battles, civil war documentary

Id: RimVw-IDiWw

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021