Fort Moultrie
Mom, Dad, Tal, Joanie and I got together for an exciting pilgrimage to Fort Moultrie.
Did you know it was the use of palm trees in the walls of this fort that helped repel a British attack during the Revolutionary War? The rubbery risilience of the palmetto trees caused the cannonballs to bounce off. That's also why the palm tree is on the South Carolina state flag. This fort is also where Chief Osceola of the Seminole died. He's still buried there.
Mom told us a story about how when she was a little girl, she went to visit a relative stationed at Fort Moultrie. At some point she wandered off from the place they were staying, then found herself lost inside rows of identical barracks. Keeping with that tradition, we managed to get lost a few times trying to find our way back and forth from Charleston.
posted by Josh Troy at 4:34 PM
2 Comments:
This is one of those stories I could just read over and over again. When I read that "Mother" got lost inside a row of identical barracks... my god, I felt sick to my stomach. Mother.
I visited Fort Moultrie several times when I was a kid. Back then, it wasn't exactly preserved as a historical site. I think there might have been a DAR marker or something, but otherwise it was just an old, crumbling, abandoned ruin, and a rather hazardous place to trespass. I spent a day there exploring when I was about 10 or 11, along with an acquaintance from Charleston. I remember it as having extensive, grassy earthworks. Inside some of the earthworks were concrete bunkers, I believe, and inside others were brick and concrete walls. And there were these iron doors leading to these narrow, "secret" passages that were actually inside the damn walls! Of course, my friend and I had to traverse all of them. I remember creeping along in the dark, feeling my way toward some faint glimmer of daylight up ahead, hoping there were no rats or particularly dangerous spiders lurking about. Not sure I'd be up for that sort of adventure today. I kinda like being out in the open.
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