Fort Howell

Fort Howell was built to protect the free. In the fall of 1864, the 32nd U.S. Colored Infantry — Black soldiers, many of them lately enslaved — dug the pentagonal earthwork on Hilton Head to defend Mitchelville, the freedmen's village where self-emancipated people had built the nation's first town of the free. The soldiers who'd escaped slavery built the fort to protect the town that proved freedom worked — the sophisticated Federal earthwork going up in a cotton field beside the village it was meant to keep safe.

The fort belonged to the Sea Islands experiment — the Department of the South's occupation zone where Harriet Tubman had led the Combahee raid that freed 800, where the freedmen of Mitchelville governed themselves while the war still raged. Fort Howell was the military proof of the experiment's seriousness: an engineered fortification built by Black troops to defend Black self-governance.

The earthworks survived the century — the pentagon still readable in the Hilton Head woods, a Network to Freedom site standing over the ground where the 32nd USCT dug defenses for the free town down the road. Mitchelville is mostly gone; Fort Howell remains — the fort built to protect the first free village.

Fort Howell is the archive's protection file — the 1864 earthwork the 32nd USCT built on Hilton Head to defend Mitchelville, the freedmen's town, the fort where Black soldiers fortified Black freedom.