Fort Fisher

They called it the Southern Gibraltar, and while it held, the Confederacy kept breathing.

Fort Fisher guarded one of the Cape Fear River's two outlets to the Atlantic, on the spit then called Federal Point or Confederate Point and now known as Pleasure Island. It protected the port of Wilmington, 21 miles upstream, from 1861 until the Union took it in 1865.

Wilmington mattered more than its size suggests. It was one of the most important points of entry for supplies reaching the Confederacy, trading cotton and tobacco outward for munitions, clothing and food coming in, and that trade fed the southern states generally and Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia specifically. The trade ran on British blockade runners, mostly steamers, slipping past the Union maritime barricade and working mainly through British colonies: Bermuda, the Bahamas, Nova Scotia. After Norfolk fell in May 1862, Wilmington's importance grew again.

Fort Fisher was strong enough to earn two nicknames, the Southern Gibraltar and the Malakoff Tower of the South. North Carolina's historic sites service puts its significance in a sentence: until the last few months of the war the fort kept Wilmington open to the blockade-runners supplying necessary goods, and its defeat helped seal the fate of the Confederacy.

The battle fought here was the most decisive Civil War engagement in North Carolina.

The site is at 1610 Fort Fisher Boulevard South in Kure Beach, open Tuesday to Saturday from 9 a.m. What survives is earthwork rather than masonry, which is worth knowing before you arrive: you are walking a shaped landscape rather than a building.