Fort Jefferson National Monument

Fort Jefferson National Monument is the record's administrative twin — the Dry Tortugas fortress seen through its federal afterlife. The sixteen-million-brick hexagon seventy miles west of Key West — never finished, never attacked — was designated a national monument by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, when the biggest masonry fort in the hemisphere became a bird-and-brick sanctuary instead of a garrison.

The monument era reframed the fort's meanings — the moat where the walls meet the sea, the lighthouse on the parade, the casemates where Dr. Samuel Mudd served his Lincoln-conspiracy sentence and worked the 1867 yellow fever outbreak that killed the prison's own doctor. The monument's purpose was always double: the fort and the reef — the Dry Tortugas' coral and the sooty tern colonies protected under the same designation.

It became Dry Tortugas National Park in 1992 — the monument name surviving in this dossier's record of the designation era: the fifty-seven years when the fort was a monument rather than a park, and the country kept the brick hexagon as both fortress and bird sanctuary.

Fort Jefferson National Monument is the archive's designation file — the 1935-1992 monument era of the Dry Tortugas fort, when the unfinished fortress of Dr. Mudd's imprisonment was held as both military relic and bird sanctuary.