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Compton & Dry view of Map No. 1.
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Fort No. 1.
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Forts Nos. 3 and 4.
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Compton & Dry View of Fort No. 3.
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Fort No. 5.
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Compton & Dry view of Fort No. 5.
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Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Map of the forts around St. Louis.
The Civil War affected St. Louis permanently. From the legacy of state control of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police from 1861 until 2013, to current battles between “urban” and “rural” interests, Missouri and its largest metropolitan area have yet to fully reconcile. Or take the commercial interests that St. Louis shared with its mother city, New Orleans, so critically broken for four years. Chicago, already burgeoning due to its ties to the Upper Midwest via the rail bridge at Rock Island, allowed the Windy City to chug along all through the war, growing and expanding westward. One could go on further, and certainly the arguments how the Civil War changed the culture and economy of St. Louis are far from settled.
But one aspect for certain still affects the City of St. Louis: the physical legacy of the ten forts and other military installations that were built in a ring around the metropolis. While the forts’ ramparts have been demolished due to development in the boom years after the war, there are a couple of places where the street grid may still reflect earthen mounds left behind until at least the mid-1870s. Likewise, there are a couple of military installations that still operate from even before the Civil War, and continued to play a critical role during and after.
First of all, in 1861, St. Louis barely made it as far as Jefferson Avenue, but already boasted a population of 160,773 in the 1860 census. Up on the Near North Side, the city spread out further than on the South Side, where the karst topography, full of sinkholes and deep valleys, prevented easier development in comparison to the Grand Prairie stretching out towards St. Charles. Unlike other cities such as Washington, D.C. or Petersburg, Virginia, which featured trenches and other bastions around the city, St. Louis seems to have only had the ten forts, each self-contained and surrounded by rifle pits. Due to standard fortification procedures, the fields out in front of the fortifications in other cities—and in St. Louis—would have been cleared of trees and other buildings, including houses, to give a clear range of fire for the cannons in the forts. Consequently, homeowners should view any construction date of their houses before 1861 with some suspicion if their property sits just to the west of the old fortification line.
The fortresses were not in any way similar to medieval fortifications. Cannon fire had long ago rendered tall masonry structures ineffective, and since the Renaissance, low, heavily fortified walls were typical. Likewise, the destruction of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor demonstrated that even antebellum masonry structures were now obsolete. Consequently, for speed of construction and cost, engineers would have embedded logs into hard-packed earthen walls, low-slung and pitched to deflect cannon fire. A bombproof shelter, made of numerous logs stacked on top of each other, would have provided safe cover for soldiers during bombardment. Gunpowder would have been stored away from the walls, and the cannons in each of the bastions could swivel to provide coverage of all sides of the fort.
The ten forts, particularly the earthworks on the south side of town, seem to sit in strategic locations, occupying the high ground that spreads roughly north and south near Jefferson Avenue. For example, Fort No. 1, which sat just beyond the Marine Hospital, a retirement home for old merchant marines, anchored the southern end of the fortifications. While it served as a hospital for soldiers in the Civil War, it had already been founded before the conflict. Looking closely, the moat of Fort No. 1 is still preserved partially in 1875’s Compton and Dry View of St. Louis.
Further north, the memory of Fort No. 2 was already obliterated by 1875, located just to the west of the rapidly expanding Lemp Brewery on Cherokee Avenue. In fact, the Lemps were busy building their state-of-the-art brewery right in the middle of the war, just a few hundred feet away. There is a misconception that St. Louis stagnated in the 1860s, but in reality, the population jumped between the 1860 and 1870 censuses to 310,864. Likewise, Fort No. 2, while protecting the Lemps’ massive capital investment, the Federal Arsenal just down the hill was the original and continuing target of the Confederacy.
Fort No. 3 is perhaps the most famous of the lingering fortifications to survive for a decade after the war. Located just south of Sidney Street in the Benton Park neighborhood, it sat on the end of a small rise, taking advantage of its elevated position. But what it truly wonderful about what is ironically one of the smaller, less complex forts is its appearance, almost completely intact in the 1875 Compton and Dry View. The engineer’s drawing of Forts No. 3 and 4 match the appearance of the lithograph almost exactly. At some point, even Fort No. 3 was destroyed.
Moving north, past Fort No. 4, which was already annihilated by the building activity around the intersection of Jefferson and Gravois, Fort No. 5 offers an interesting story. The moat of at least one of the curved bastions was still visible in 1875, despite the rapid development of Lafayette Square just to the east. In fact, famous mansions can already be seen lining Missouri Avenue. Triangular-shaped, Fort No. 5 sat at an angle, which can be seen in the engineer’s drawing.
Past Lafayette Square, the expansion of the city on the flat land west of Jefferson Avenue up north assured that the fortifications would be torn down quickly after the war. There does not appear to be any physical evidence of those forts left in the street grid or topography. One also wonders about any fortifications that must surely have protected James Eads’ ironclad yards in Carondelet, which of course was an independent city back in the 1860s. Regardless, the old images and drawings, still in the Library of Congress, give modern-day St. Louis a glimpse of what was once the most tumultuous period in American history.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at naffziger@gmail.com.
