At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate gunners fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War. After 34 hours of non-stop shelling, the fort's Union garrison surrendered, and on April 14 the Confederates took the fort. Fort Sumter then became the focus of a bitter four-year struggle as Union forces tried to regain it and control Charleston Harbor. The fort looks much different than it did in 1861: its top two tiers were destroyed during the Civil War, and its center is now dominated by Battery Huger, a huge black concrete artillery emplacement built in 1898-99. Used by the army for coastal defense through World War II, Fort Sumter reflects more than one hundred years of military activity in the 1930s-1940s and became a National Monument in 1948.