Fort Taylor

Recently, I had occasion to visit a fort that was new to me. Over the holidays, I spent some time in Key West, which is a fancy place frequented by lots of rich people who like to shop and be fabulous. Whatever. I had resigned myself to a long weekend of poring over the footnotes for Infinite Jest on the beach, when all of a sudden, it hit me: as the U.S.'s southernmost geographical point, Key West has strategic value! Somebody must have built a fort here at some point!

Sure enough, check out Fort Zachary Taylor's sweet fuckin' business:


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Fort Taylor turned out to be a vacation goldmine. It was built at about the same time as forts Pulaski and Gorges (see previous posts) but, like Gorges, it took a while to be finished, meaning that it is now time for:

A Brief Digression on Trends in Historical
American Coastal Fort Construction:

Americans take roughly as long to finish their forts as Europeans take to finish their cathedrals. This is because forts don't really need to be completely finished in order to work (I refer you to Palpatine's 'fully operational' line in Return of the Jedi). In the 1800s all coastal forts were designed to have several tiers (or as civilians call them, 'floors') of guns. This was convenient, since it was a modular design. Once the first tiers were built, guns were installed; this generally so relieved people that they celebrated by taking a break from fort-building for a few decades. Every generation or so, some asshole king in Europe would get all stroppy, war would brew, and everyone would run around and built more tiers on their forts. Over the lifetime of a fort (more than a hundred years in this and other cases), advances in siegecraft meant drastic redesigns became necessary if the fort was to remain in effective service. Thus, forts were often built and rebuilt several times, leading to interesting architectural contrasts.

Finis

Fort Taylor was conceived as a small trapezoidal battery of large smoothbore cannon. At the time of its initial construction (1845), warships were still made of wood, so seacoast forts were designed to fire hot shot. Similar to smack cut with arsenic, hot shot is bad news. The idea was to heat cannonballs red-hot in a furnace before they were loaded and fired at ships, so they would set the (wooden) ship afire when they hit home. Hot shot was also a one-way street; shot furnaces weren't safe aboard ship and anyway, it's pretty hard to set fire to a brick or stone fort in the first place. To get the best range with hot shot, you want to fire them on a relatively flat trajectory so they will skip over the water and hit the hull dead-on so they penetrate (thus hot shot was only fired from the lowest tier of guns). After being heated in the big furnace, the hot shots were carried by small children to the gun emplacements on the first tier, which each had a cute little mini-furnace to keep the hot shot searing until it was needed. During half-time, they made for pretty good hibachis to cook fish the gun crew would catch from the moat out of the gun port.


So, in re: the picture above, I couldn't help but notice you appreciating the brickwork. 'Damn,' I heard you muttering to yourself. 'That's some good-ass brickwork!' Well, sir or ma'am, all I can say is that you have an eye for fine brickwork. I'm glad you brought it up, because this brings us to:

A Brief Digression on Trends in Historical
American Coastal Fort Construction Workers:

There is a problem. Americans don't know how to build forts. They're more into the like log-cabin shtick. Slabs and vaults, those groovy parabolic arches: a little out of their league. So to build their forts, America imported gangs of masons from Europe (this was occasionally a contributing factor in pissing off asshole kings). These guys were cathedral-trained pros who mostly didn't speak English and had peculiar cuisines. Kept to zemzelves and no you can't have any soup. The Army roughed out the location, put up some string to show where to build the walls, and then let the swarthy soup-eaters have at it. This explains some of the interesting architectural choices you see , particularly in some parts of the ceiling:


My mother, a veteran of many construction sites, immediately identified this architectural phenomenon as "the foreman wasn't looking so they just kludged it together." This sort of excitable overvaulting is what happens when consummate contractors meet incompetent engineers.

Finis

Anyway, all that brick stuff is the north side of the fort (on the right in the picture above). The south side of the fort was modernized in the 20th century to defend against (surprise!) asshole European dictators. The gunports were bricked up and a hardened concrete gun battery was put in on top of the old wall.


The best part is that when the fort was modernized the old cannons were scrapped; 60 years late and out of date, son! Instead of melting them down, however, the cannons were mixed in with the concrete of the new fortifications, kind of like giant hunks of rebar. In the picture below, you can see a couple of 15-inch smoothbore Rodmans partially excavated in situ, weight approx 49,909 lb. ea.


Anyway, what with reading all the signs, skipping stones in the moat, and climbing up onto the parts of the fort that you're not supposed to climb up on to, Fort Taylor kept me pleasurably occupied for an afternoon.You should visit it if you ever end up in Key West by accident or on purpose. I recommend you bring a good kite to this fort because if you go out on the beach (killing field) you can catch this beautifully stiff breeze coming in off the Gulf. Kitestring for miles if you got it.