Castillo de San Marcos
Interesting facts
- When Confederate militia came for the fort in January 1861, the lone Union caretaker would only hand it over in exchange for a written receipt, which he got.
- In 1837 the Seminole leader Coacoochee and nineteen others escaped; he claimed to have squeezed through a 20-centimetre cell opening and slid down a rope into the moat.
- During the 1702 siege about 1,500 townspeople and soldiers crowded inside the walls for two months while English cannonballs sank harmlessly into the coquina.
- Before the stone fort, Spain built a succession of nine wooden forts along the coast over some 80 years after Francis Drake raided the town with 22 ships in 1586.
- The moat was usually kept dry, but in case of a land attack it could be flooded with seawater to a depth of about 30 centimetres.
- From 1687, people escaping slavery in Carolina were freed in St. Augustine if they became Catholic, leading to Fort Mose, the first free Black settlement in the future US.
- During the American Revolution the British held three Founding Fathers prisoner here: Thomas Heyward Jr., Arthur Middleton and Edward Rutledge.
- Plains Indian prisoners held at the fort from 1875 produced hundreds of drawings in ledger books, and part of that collection is now in the Smithsonian Institution.
- In 1964 the Freedom Tree on the fort's green became a gathering point for civil rights demonstrators in St. Augustine, whose protests helped bring about the Civil Rights Act.
- The American Society of Civil Engineers named the fort a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1975.
Why it is worth it
The Castillo de San Marcos is a low, pale star of stone on the shore of Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Florida, and the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. Four pointed bastions, a moat and a sloping glacis give it the geometry of the classic bastioned fort, and its walls are built of coquina, a soft local stone made of countless tiny shells cemented together.
Spain had guarded St. Augustine, founded in 1565 by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, with a string of wooden forts after Francis Drake attacked the town in 1586. When the English privateer Robert Searles burned the town in 1668, the crown approved a stone fortress. The Spanish engineer Ignacio Daza designed it, the first stones were laid in October 1672 and the core was finished in 1695. The coquina was quarried on Anastasia Island across the bay and ferried over; most of the labour came from Native Americans of the nearby Spanish missions, with skilled workers brought from Havana. The bastions carry the names San Pedro, San Agustín, San Carlos and San Pablo. From 1738 the engineer Pedro Ruiz de Olano rebuilt the interior with vaulted ceilings, raising the walls to about 10 metres.
The fort was besieged twice, by Carolina forces in 1702 and by James Oglethorpe in 1740, and both times the porous coquina swallowed cannonballs rather than shattering. It was never taken by force, yet it changed hands peacefully several times: to Britain in 1763, back to Spain in 1784 and to the United States in 1821, when it became Fort Marion. Under American rule it served as a prison for Native Americans, including the Seminole leader Osceola and members of Geronimo's Chiricahua Apache. It became a national monument in 1924, passed to the National Park Service in 1933, and regained its Spanish name in 1942.
Getting there
The fort stands in St. Augustine, Florida, on the bayfront at the edge of the historic district. Northeast Florida Regional Airport (UST) is about 7 km away; Jacksonville International Airport (JAX) is about 75 km to the north in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States; it is located on the western shore of Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Florida.
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