FORT FISHER | Christmas Eve came with a bang 150 years ago in Southeastern North Carolina.
At 1:46 in the morning on Dec. 24, 1864, the USS Louisiana — an aging, flat-bottomed powder ship stuffed with explosives — blew up some 600 yards from Fort Fisher, the massive Confederate earthworks that guarded the approaches to Wilmington.
The blast — a pet project of Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler — was supposed to leave a massive hole in those earthworks, knocking down cannons and killing or stunning much of the garrison.
It was loud enough to be heard in Wilmington, where it awoke worried Confederate officers, and by some accounts as far away as Beaufort, some 70 miles to the north.
But it didn’t work. An undertow and an offshore breeze had pulled the Louisiana off course. Its captain wrongly thought he was just 300 yards offshore when he set the fuses and abandoned ship. The blast left a vast pillar of smoke, but onshore, as historian Rod Gragg noted in his book “Confederate Goliath,” not even the marsh grass was disturbed.
A group of teenaged Junior Reserves, camping on the beach, were jarred from their tents “like popcorn from a popper,” in the words of one witness, frightened but otherwise unhurt. There were no other casualties.
A battle remembered
That was the prelude to the first, unsuccessful assault on Fort Fisher, which would fall to the Federals two weeks later.
Ironically, the Fort Fisher State Historic Site will be closed Dec. 24-26 for the Christmas holiday on the 150th anniversary of that first battle. The site and local re-enactors held their official celebration Saturday, with tours, living-history demonstrations and the firing of the fort’s 32-pound replica seacoast cannon.
“This is kind of our preview for the big one next year,” said site manager Jim Steele.
The “big one” is the 150th anniversary of the second, bigger battle of Fort Fisher, Jan. 13-15, 1865 — in the words of historian Rowena Reed, the largest amphibious operation in American history until the Allied invasion of Normandy, nearly 80 years later.
A Union fleet of nearly 60 vessels under Adm. David D. Porter pounded the fort from the sea, while a force of some 10,000 soldiers came ashore near Myrtle Sound. Units from this force would finally overcome the fort’s 1,500 defenders on Jan. 15, attacking from the northern, landward side.
Locals are planning a major celebration. The Friends of Fort Fisher, the site’s nonprofit support group, is holding a reunion Jan. 14-15 for descendants of soldiers, sailors and Marines who fought on either side in the two battles.
“We thought we’d be lucky to have 50 or 60 show up,” said Paul Laird of the Friends.
Instead, more than 150 participants have already registered.
The descendants will be treated to two days of VIP tours, lectures, presentations by conservators from the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh on how to save their families’ papers and memorabilia, and music, much of it arranged by reunion chairman John Golden.
Descendants will also be encouraged to write down their family stories and family traditions about what Fort Fisher was like, Laird said.
Following on the weekend of Jan. 17-18 will be the official anniversary observance, titled “Nor Shall Your Glory Be Forgot.” (The line comes from the Theodore O’Hara poem “The Bivouac of the Dead.”) More than 300 re-enactors will be involved in two separate re-stagings, on Saturday and Sunday, of the final assault on the fort (see sidebar).
More than 7,500 people turned out for 145th anniversary observances, Steele said, so state officials are expecting between 10,000 and 15,000 to visit during the two-day event next month.
A piece of history
Outside of New Hanover County, Fort Fisher has sometimes seemed like one of the Civil War’s best-kept secrets. Most histories lend it little space, focusing on bigger, splashier battles such as Gettysburg or Shiloh. Ken Burns’ “Civil War” movie summed it up in barely a sentence.
Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film “Lincoln,” however, had an extended scene showing President Lincoln and his Cabinet members following the course of the battle from the War Department’s telegraph room in Washington.
In fact, the fort was the key to Wilmington, the Confederacy’s last major commercial port and a key to its supply line, said Chris Fonvielle, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Hundreds of blockade runners slipped under Fort Fisher’s protective guns through the Union blockade and into Wilmington. There, their precious cargoes of arms, ammunition, medicines and other vital supplies were loaded onto the Wilmington Weldon railroad and rushed north to the Confederate capital, Richmond.
In a famous letter to Col. Lamb, Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, wrote that “if Wilmington falls, I cannot maintain my army.”
“By then, Wilmington was the Confederacy’s most important city,” Fonvielle said.
In the end, Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, less than 90 days after Union forces seized the fort.
History is money
One hundred fifty years later, Fort Fisher is still valuable — this time, as a tourist attraction.
According to Steele, some 600,000 visitors, on average, pass through the Fort Fisher historic site each year. That’s considerably fewer than the 1.2 million visitors to the Gettysburg battlefield in 2013, but more than the 200,000-plus annual visitors to the Battleship North Carolina Memorial or the 77,000 annual visits that the Bentonville battlefield near Newton Grove – North Carolina’s other big Civil War battle site — received in 2010.
Assessing the impact of all those visits can be a bit of a challenge. Neither the local Convention and Visitors Bureau nor the Pleasure Island Chamber of Commerce keep statistics on Civil War tourism.
Still, some numbers tell a story. Roughly 75 percent of Fort Fisher’s visitors come between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Steele said. Of these summer visitors, about half come from outside North Carolina.
“Civil War sites are tourist magnets,” said Mary Koik, a spokesman for the Civil War Trust, a nonprofit group devoted to the preservation of battlefield sites. “Numerous studies have shown that people who visit historic sites, and particularly battlefields, are the ideal guests: They tend to spend more in local shops and restaurants and stay longer in local hotels.”
One economic impact study by the Civil War Trust found that a typical family of four spends $1,000 during its visit to a Civil War site. Visit NC, the state tourism agency, found that out-of-state parties to coastal North Carolina typically spend $1,179 on an overnight visit.
Richard Lewis, a spokesman for the state-run Virginia Tourism Corporation, said his agency had found that families which include at least one Civil War stop in their visits tend to spend more than ordinary tourists and to stay in the area longer.
The 145th anniversary of the Battle of Bentonville in 2010 drew more than 50,000 visitors to the relatively isolated area and pumped an estimated $5 to $6 million into the local economy, according to the Civil War Trust.
A 2013 study by the UNC Center for Competitive Economies found that tourism to the Battleship North Carolina contributed nearly $8 million to the local economy and generated an estimated 303 jobs in the area. As already noted, Fort Fisher’s visitation is nearly three times that of the battleship.
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War has boosted attendance at all the state’s related sites, said Mike Hill, co-chairman of the Civil War 150 Committee in the state Department of Cultural Resources.
“But it’s not like it was during the centennial” in 1961-65, Hill said.
Back then, he speculated, more people remembered grandparents or other relatives who had actually fought in the war. (The last known Civil War veteran died in 1956.) Also, a backlash to the civil rights movement might have sparked pro-Confederate sentiment in the South.
Bound for ‘Glory’
On Jan. 17 and 18, the Fort Fisher State Historic Site in Kure Beach will mark the official 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Fisher with an observance that’s being called titled “Nor Shall Your Glory Be Forgot.” More than 300 re-enactors will be involved in two separate re-stagings of the final assault on the fort on that Saturday and Sunday.
Edwin C. Bearrs, former chief historian of the National Parks Service and a familiar figure from his commentary in Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” will be keynote speaker, and a number of other historians, including Rod Gragg (“Confederate Goliath”), Chris Fonvielle (“Faces of Fort Fisher”) and Richard Triebe (“Fort Fisher to Elmira”) will give talks.
A historical unit from Camp Lejeune will give living history demonstrations on the role of U.S. Marines in the battle, while another re-enactor unit will illustrate the role of the Confederate “torpedo” (mine) service on the Cape Fear River.
The site will unveil a new exhibit on Col. William Lamb, the fort’s commander for much of the war, and new interpretative markers on the site’s hiking trail. An evening “lantern tour” will be among the many tours available, and more demonstrations will show off garrison life, the infantry manual of arms and artillery firing. The Huckleberry Brothers and the Shanty Men will provide period music.
For more information on the observance, call 910-458-5538 or go to nchistoricsites.org/fisher
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