Fort Macon became a state park in 1924, when the fort was all that remained of the military post and all other traces of the Army’s 19th-century presence were gone. The fort itself and a US Lifesaving Service, later Coast Guard, station built in 1904 were the only structures at the eastern end of Bogue Banks. The surrounding landscape was then open savanna bordered by marshland and low sand dunes, and although development and visitation increased in the 1930s, the park retained this pastoral character for many years. When the park was first established, it was administered by the North Carolina Division of Forestry, which between 1927 and 1930 planted thousands of pine seedlings around the fort to test which types grew best along the coast. Officials monitored the young trees during periodic visits until August 3, 1932, when a wildfire started by careless visitors swept through the area and destroyed them. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the grounds around the fort and the adjacent U.S. Coast Guard Station remained largely open, with marshes, dunes, grazing sheep, and a distant cottage that served from 1936 to 1941 as the park’s vacation cabin, rented furnished for $20 a week.