Fort Zachary Taylor

Fort Taylor never fired a shot in anger — its war was deterrent and blockade, the Rodman and Columbiad guns backing the squadron that strangled Gulf ports. It worked again in 1898 for the Spanish-American War and stayed on the Army's books, remarkably, until 1947.

The arsenals, though, kept the war. When the casemates were modernized in the Endicott era, the obsolete cannon were entombed inside the walls rather than hauled off; in 1968 workers broke into the buried chambers and found the largest cache of Civil War-era seacoast cannon in the United States, in place. The fort is now a National Historic Landmark and a state park, the guns still in their casemates.

The reported register has a named ghost, which is rarer than it sounds: 'Wendal,' the file calls him — a soldier said to have died of yellow fever during the Civil War, allegedly captured in photographs over the years. One visitor account describes two companions watching a soldier walk straight through the brick divider between casemate rooms, an account notable mostly for the skeptic converting on the spot.

The fuller tour inventory includes soldiers falling into formation amid whistles, the slam of a trap door at noon — attributed to executions the record does not clearly file — screams in the old jail cells, a burned young girl reported in the hospital wing, and the claim of mass yellow-fever graves beneath the fort. The archive keeps all of it as reported material; the documented version of the epidemic is bad enough without embellishment.

The brickwork keeps both histories — the garrison that held the Union's southernmost point for four years, and the guns sealed in the walls for a century until the sledgehammers found them. The reports concentrate where the file would predict: the casemates, the jail, the hospital. The park around the walls now holds what may be the island's best swimming beach — the garrison's posthumous career is sand, snorkeling, and wedding photographs on the terreplein.

Whether Wendal occupies the rooms is a question the state park answers with a ticket booth and a beach. The file's note is simpler: a fort that spent twenty-one years being built and four years holding a rebellion was always going to have an occupancy problem.