File:Coast watch (1979) (20666139661).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_6 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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By C.R. Edgerton Nine million bricks. Tons and tons of shifting sand. And a hole big enough to hold a small ship. That's what Fort Macon meant to the slaves and day laborers who built it in the early decades of the last century. Today, 157 years later, Fort Macon is North Carolina's most visited state park. If you think the beautiful beaches that kiss the lips of this old fort are the real drawing card of Fort Macon State Park, think again. "Our coastal parks are by far the most visited," says Margaret Hassell of the N.C. Divi- sion of Parks and Recreation. "But in this case, the fort itself is the drawing card. It's unique to that part of the state." Hassell says almost 1.4 million people strolled into Fort Macon State Park in 1992. And few of those beachgoers left without taking at least a peek at the brick structure lying just a few hundred yards from the sand and surf. An overriding sense of shared history lures people of both Northern and Southern persuasion from the scrunchy sand of the park's wide beaches into the grass and brick pentagon that make up Fort Macon proper. On its way to becoming one of North Carolina's most popular tour- ist attractions, this stately brick monument paid its dues as a sentinel for the state's barrier islands. It has weathered the fiercest hurricanes, the ravages of war and the abuse of men who left it more than once abandoned. It's a curious landmark for seabirds and a place to which catbrier clings. Of the fort's decades of history, spring. Sea gulls squawked at schooling fish. It was a perfect day at the beach. But not so perfect for Col. Moses White, the Confederate offi- cer commanding Fort Macon. He hadn't come to the desolate spit of sand at the tip of Bogue Banks for a vacation. He was sent there to de- fend a fort that some military people considered already obsolete. Like other commanders before Gen. Robert E. Lee never entered the fort during the Civil War, but he did visit in the 1840s. As a young lieutenant, he came to Bogue Banks to design a system of jetties to help prevent erosion.
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perhaps no period is better known than the Civil War years. "That's why most people come to the fort," says Christy Skojec, a park guide and historical interpreter. "There's just a great deal of interest in the Civil War." The climax of that history began at dawn on April 25, 1862. Warm sea breezes signaled the coming of him, the colonel saw his service at Fort Macon as less than desirable. The isolation and mundane daily tasks of drill and prepare made duty there an exile of sorts. But that's the way the duty had always been. Since the first of its 9.3 million bricks was laid in 1826, the fort had been the dropping-off place Continued COASTWATCH 13

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