Ship Island (Gulf Islands National Seashore, NPS)

Ship Island was the Gulf's staging ground — the barrier island with the only deep-water anchorage on the Mississippi coast, where ten thousand British troops rendezvoused in December 1814 before dying at New Orleans. That memory drove the fort: Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of War, pushed the appropriation through in 1857 for a Third System brick fort on the island, arguing the British had proven the route. It was the last brick fort built on the Gulf Coast — and it was never finished.

The construction read like a siege — the first superintendent died of yellow fever, storms flattened the walls, and after two years only eight feet stood. When Mississippi seceded in January 1861, Confederates seized the works and shored them with timber and sandbags; that summer the USS Massachusetts shelled the island in the war's first Gulf exchange, and by fall the Union held Ship Island — making it the staging base for Farragut's capture of New Orleans and later a prison camp for Confederate POWs, whose barracks and hospital filled the parade ground the fort's own garrison had never finished.

The fort got its name by accident — Hancock's 1884 report called it Fort Massachusetts after the ship that retook the island, and the name stuck to a fort that never received an official one. The island kept dividing — Hurricane Camille split it in two in 1969, and the cut was only filled by the Corps in 2019. The fort still stands at the west end of the reunited island, unfinished and undefeated.

Ship Island is the archive's staging-ground file — the Mississippi barrier island where the British massed for New Orleans, where the unfinished fort changed hands in 1861 and held POWs after, and which Camille split in half.