Fort Pulaski National Monument, Georgia, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Fort Pulaski National Monument, Georgia, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Fort Pulaski National Monument, Georgia, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-9873B2

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Sometime in the 1950s, an American family pulled off the highway and paid a visit to a nineteenth-century fort, which is the decade's preferred way of teaching children that history happened somewhere specific. Fort Pulaski, on Cockspur Island outside Savannah, sits in the peculiar national-monument condition of being both a genuine battlefield and a very tidy park, its brick bastions mowed and its cannons arranged at photogenic angles, as though the Civil War had been staged for a generation that needed it explained without undue mess.

The two-story interior barracks with their white-railed gallery and the earthwork traverses sloping up from the parade ground still looked in the 1950s almost exactly as they had when Union rifled artillery reduced the walls in 1862 — an event that quietly ended the era of masonry fortification and which the National Park Service had not yet figured out how to make feel urgent. A modern office tower is just visible on the Savannah skyline behind the ramparts, framing the old fort the way the twentieth century always framed the nineteenth: still standing, slightly beside the point.

The tourist at the lower right, cap pulled down, has his back to the cannons and is looking at something off to the side — which is, statistically, the correct response to being shown a place where something important happened and being given no particular reason to feel it.

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