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COL. LEE'S BIRD SANCTUARY Now silent and overgrown, with an unknown future, Fort Carroll started as a promising pre-Civil War project by Robert E. Lee

April 14, 2007 12:35 am

This is part of a series of stories this year about Robert E. Lee in connection with the bicentennial of the Confederate commander's birth.

IN THE MIDDLE of Baltimore's Patapsco River, just below the Key Bridge, a small hexagonal island crouches in the shallows on the edge of Sollers Point Flats. Currently facing an uncertain future, Fort Carroll will be remembered for its association with Robert E. Lee and its fate as an island fortress besieged only by progress, politics and the creeping erosion of time.

Fort Carroll is a fortified artificial island of 3.4 acres, originally designed to shield Baltimore from a repeat of the invasion suffered during the War of 1812.

As Baltimore expanded after that war, people came to realize that Fort McHenry, the storied home of "The Star-Spangled Banner," was just too close to the city to provide adequate protection. At the urging of Col. Joseph G. Totten, then chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, Baltimoreans filed a petition to the Senate in 1841 to build a new defensive fort.

In 1847, the state of Maryland agreed to permit the U.S. War Department to site a fort seven miles downriver from the city and Fort McHenry, on the north side of the Patapsco's main channel, positioned to repulse foreign fleets trying the river route to Baltimore.

Fort Carroll was one of 50-some maritime fortresses eventually built along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, positioned to defend major port cities. Part of the "Permanent System" or "Third System" of coastal defenses, the fortresses were the products of a military that had been forged in the War of 1812 and tempered in the Mexican War of 1846-48. Robert E. Lee was one of the more promising engineering officers to come out of that latter conflict.

After his service in Mexico, Lee returned home to Arlington at the end of June 1848, but just a few days later he was back in uniform on "special duty" in Totten's office, and by July 21 he was reinstated as a member of the board of engineers for the Atlantic Coast defenses, a position he vacated while serving in Mexico.

On Aug. 24, 1848, Lee received a brevet commission for his bravery at Chapultepec, and became Col. Lee.

Work had begun on the fort in Baltimore Harbor in 1847 when Maj. Cornelius A. Ogden laid off the site; the preliminary work continued into the next year. Lee was initially assigned to the project in September 1848, but suspended work during the winter and returned to the project in April 1849.

In the interim, he moved his family to a three-story brick residence at 908 Madison Ave. in Baltimore. Each workday, Lee rode public transportation to the harbor wharf, where two oarsmen met him with a boat and rowed him to the project.

Lee's first task was to determine whether the Patapsco's bed was solid enough to hold the fort's projected massive weight. The fledgling colonel had received abundant hydrographic experience testing the Mississippi River's channels and quickly found stable river bottom 45 feet beneath the Patapsco's low-water level.

He then turned to erecting construction wharves, driving a thousand piles and placing granite footings under water, before finally commencing the actual fort.

To ensure the work's progress, Lee spent long hours in the summer sun on the mosquito-infested job site. Late in July, he developed a fever thought to be malaria and left Baltimore to recuperate, returning only at the end of August.

About that time, he received a most intriguing offer from a Cuban revolutionary junta in New York that was preparing to launch an attack on Cuba's Spanish government. Members of the junta offered Lee a command, but he took the strictest view of his duty to the U.S. Army and declined to consider the proposal.

Lee's social life in Baltimore became far more active, with his whole family finding friends and attending nearby Calvary Church.

On his job, Lee was employing a sheet pile driver, a saw devised to cut off foundation piles at a uniform depth under the water, a dredge, and even a diving bell.

The foundations of the seawall had been driven and cut off 15 feet below low water, and three courses of masonry, 10 feet wide and 250 feet long, had been raised 6 feet above the foundations. Builders used Port Deposit "granite," a coarse-grained gneiss quarried in Port Deposit and other quarries around Cecil County, Md.

Nothing more was needed, Gen. Totten commented, to ensure rapid and very satisfactory progress on the fort--except regular appropriations.

The fort was officially named after Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Maryland leader and the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Work continued, as the weather permitted, into the spring of 1852, when Lee received the following letter from Totten, dated May 27, Washington, D.C.:

"You will prepare yourself to transfer the operations now under your charge temporarily to Lieut. [W.H.C.] Whiting, in order that you may proceed to West Point towards the close of the month of August and on the 1st of September next relieve Capt. [Henry] Brewerton of the Superintendency of the Military Academy, and of the command of the post of West Point, Capt. Brewerton to succeed to duty at Fort Carroll."

Lee was not happy with the transfer. He felt that he lacked experience and did not believe he could fulfill the expectations. He responded to Totten that same day:

"Although fully appreciating the honor of the station, and extremely reluctant to oppose my wishes to the orders of the Department, yet if I be allowed any option in the matter, I would respectfully ask that some other successor than myself be appointed to the present able Superintendent."

Disregarding his misgivings, Lee left for West Point. Fort Carroll was his last engineering work for the United States, keeping him at Sollers' Point for three years and five months, through the project's vexing start-up phases.

After his departure, construction proceeded slowly, hampered by lack of funding and the difficulty of building such a heavy structure on soft sand.

The fort's original design called for four tiers fitted with 225 cannons. A navigation light with a sixth-order Fresnel lens was installed in 1854, marking the turn from the Brewerton Channel to the Fort McHenry Channel leading in and out of Baltimore Harbor.

By the coming of the Civil War, Fort Carroll was still only partially completed, with its walls less than half the design height.

During the war, Union Gen. Lew Wallace, hero of the Battle of Monocacy and later the author of "Ben Hur," proposed that Fort Carroll would make an ideal "prison for the feminine blockade runners and spies, who are many, offending against law and order." Like all the other uses later proposed for the island, Wallace's idea never came to fruition.

Despite doubling its original cost of $1 million, the fort remained incomplete in 1887. Advances in artillery during the Civil War made the "Third System" defenses obsolete, but Fort Carroll was re-armed and updated, then updated again in response to hostilities with Spain in the late 1890s.

New concrete gun emplacements--Batteries Towson, Heart and Augustin, designed under the "Endicott System"--mounted 15-, 12- and 10-inch breech-loading rifles as well as 8-inch and 5-inch guns. But the new batteries were not ready until the war with Spain was well over.

The military built three more shore-based forts: Forts Smallwood and Howard near the river's mouth, and Fort Armistead across the Patapsco on Hawkins Point, the anvil to Fort Carroll's hammer.

Both forts were integral parts of Baltimore's antisubmarine system during World War I, serving as staging areas and firing points for the mines placed in the harbor's entrance. But at the close of the war, the Army stripped Carroll's guns.

In March 1921 the Army officially abandoned the obsolete fort, declaring it to be excess property and moving all remaining military equipment to nearby Fort Howard.

The lighthouse on Fort Carroll's ramparts had been completely rebuilt in 1898 and automated in 1920, but was discontinued in 1931. The fort returned to limited service during World War II as a firing range for the Army and Coast Guard and as a holding area for foreign sailors whose ships were decontaminated before entering Baltimore Harbor. After World War II both the fort and the lighthouse were abandoned.

Not all of the fort's history had been martial. In 1909, Mayor J. Barry Mahool wanted to erect a statue of Lord Cecil Calvert to rival the Statue of Liberty.

Mayor William F. Broening broadened the idea in 1923, proposing an additional large electric sign reading "Welcome to Baltimore." Other statue proposals honored Christopher Columbus and Orpheus. Some people wanted to use the fort as an island prison like Alcatraz or as a museum.

Attempts in 1948 and 1955 to sell the property to the city of Baltimore failed, but in 1958, local attorney Benjamin Eisenberg bought the entire fort at public auction for $10,010.

Eisenberg hoped to capitalize on the fort's unusual setting and establish a casino, but the plan fell apart when court rulings placed the site within Baltimore County, where gambling was illegal, rather than in gambling-tolerant Anne Arundel County.

Eisenberg still spent a great deal of money and effort patching up the fort's neglected walls, planting peach trees, keeping the interior landscaped and trying to promote the fortress as a destination for tourist boats.

His granddaughter Beverly remembers painting bowling balls to be used in pyramidal stacks of cannon balls, perfect adornments for the guns Eisenberg had cast from concrete.

In 1964, real estate developer Robert L. Jackson leased the fort and ferried picnic guests on his private passenger hydrofoil, the Baltimore Clipper.

Eisenberg then proposed using the island as a part of the structure for the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a link in the Baltimore Beltway. He envisioned a 20-story hotel built on the island, with the bridge's roadway supported on top.

But, as the years wore on, the only creatures to move onto the island were the birds, thousands of birds, nesting on the battlements and in the spreading peach trees, transforming the fort into a world-class colonial nesting bird rookery, the most species-diverse colony within 100 miles.

In 1998, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Barnett Rattner, a staff scientist at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, discovered "a fabulous nesting site" for hundreds of herons and egrets, including black-crowned night-herons.

Regional developer Bill Struever leased the island from the Eisenberg family in 2000, intending to "preserve this terrific piece of history" and "protect the site from neglect and decay."

Struever's firm is noted for its "adaptive reuse," retooling old industrial buildings for modern uses.

"The fort has some of the most magnificent rooms I've ever seen," he said. "The brickwork is breathtaking."

But instead of guns, the island citadel is ardently guarded by Maryland's Chesapeake Bay critical area environmental laws, making redevelopment difficult.

The trees that hold the nests are damaging the fort's roofs and floors, but the trees can't be cut because state law protects the rookery. The open interior has become a continuous thicket of bushes, trees and vines.

The island also serves as a field site for water quality and habitat monitoring, and the surrounding waters are part of a new oyster reef restoration project.

"I still think it's possible to work out cohabitation with the birds," said Struever, but the developer recently let his lease option lapse.

A Mississippi casino company also looked into using the fortress as a possible gambling site.

"It's a unique and fairly historic piece of property," said George Williams, former director of Maryland's Office of Tourism Development, currently working for Isle of Capri Casinos in Biloxi, Miss. "But I saw a lot of problems--access problems, utility problems, construction problems, not to mention that Maryland law at the present time does not allow slots or casino gambling."

First Mariner Bank chairman and CEO Ed Hale wanted to see Fort Carroll restored and added to the roster of historic sites ringing the Inner Harbor. He envisioned water taxis linking the sites in a National Historic Seaport tour.

The island's current owner, Alan G. Eisenberg, recently said, "I'd like to see it used as a terminus for LNG [liquid natural gas] ships."

The fort has even spawned urban legends. Beverly Eisenberg, an architect and Fort Carroll's de facto chief engineer, tells of a tunnel allegedly running from Fort Armistead's graffiti-tagged subterranean ammunition bunkers out to the island fortress.

Eisenberg has had her own ideas for Fort Carroll, and created design drawings for a self-sustaining community on the island--Eco-Librium--entered into the American Institute of Architects' 1991 Sustainable Community Competition.

She visited the fort last year. "There were nests everywhere, and the birds were not happy when we went there. The birds are manageable. It would be doable to have the nesting site and light visitor traffic. But it's a hard one. I'd love someone to come out of the blue and get [Fort Carroll] to a place where people can visit it. But I don't see that happening."

For now, the birds will retain sole possession of the island, the fort and its Amazonian tangle of trees, shrubs and poison ivy.

Col. Lee's bird sanctuary is direct kin to bastions made famous during the Civil War: Sumter, Pulaski, Monroe, Jefferson, Delaware. They were some of the world's most spectacular harbor defense structures and the meat of talented military engineers like Robert E. Lee.

The massive, vertical-walled forts offered structural durability, concentrated armament and overwhelming firepower. Ironically, the only shots ever fired at Fort Carroll were from light-caliber weapons out on the practice range.