Fort Pickens
Fort Pickens is a pentagonal historic United States military fort on Santa Rosa Island, at the entrance to Pensacola Bay. It is named after American Revolutionary War hero Andrew Pickens. The fort was completed in 1834 and remained in use in some form until 1947. Fort Pickens is currently part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, and as such, is administered by the National Park Service.
Construction
French engineer Simon Bernard was appointed to design Fort Pickens. Construction on Fort Pickens lasted from 1829 to 1834, with 21.5 million bricks being used to build the fort. Much of the construction was done by slave labor.
Fort Pickens was the largest of a group of forts designed to fortify Pensacola's harbor. Fort Pickens supplemented Fort Barrancas, Fort McRee, and the Navy Yard. Located at the western tip of Santa Rosa Island, just offshore from the mainland, Pickens guarded the island and the entrance to the harbor. Its construction was supervised by Colonel William H. Chase of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Ironically, during the Civil War some years later, Chase was later appointed by the State of Florida to command its troops and seize for the South the very fort he had built.
Civil War
By the time of the Civil War, Fort Pickens had not been regularly occupied since the Mexican–American War. However, Lieutenant Adam J. Slemmer, in charge of United States forces at Fort Barrancas, determined that Fort Pickens was more defensible than any of the other posts in the area.
His decision to abandon Fort Barrancas was hastened when, around midnight of January 8, 1861, his guards repelled a group of local men intending to take the fort. Some historians suggest that these were the first shots fired by United States forces in the Civil War. Shortly after this incident, Slemmer destroyed over 20,000 pounds of gunpowder at Fort McRee, spiked the guns at Barrancas, and evacuated about eighty troops to Fort Pickens. Despite repeated Confederate military threats to it, Fort Pickens remained in Union hands throughout the Civil War.
