Fort Wyman was the first of two Union artillery field fortifications built at Rolla, where the South West Branch of the Pacific Railroad of Missouri reached the Ozarks by the beginning of 1861 and made the town a strategically important railhead between St. Louis and Springfield when war broke out in Missouri. Colonel Franz Sigel's troops seized Rolla in a bloodless coup on June 14, 1861, as part of General Nathaniel Lyon's plan to control Missouri's river and railroad network, and federal troops remained there for the duration of the war. Rolla became the primary forward supply point for Union armies in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas from 1861 into 1865, with quartermasters, soldiers, and civilian employees transferring thousands of tons of war material, food, and forage from railcars to warehouses and wagons to support forces as far away as Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove, Arkansas, in 1862 and during General Sterling Price's Expedition in 1864. To support this freight operation, the army built warehouses, loading docks, forage sheds, blacksmith shops, and wagon repair facilities, and in 1863 began a second fortification, Fort Dette, north of town. No Confederate force ever seriously threatened Rolla, and Fort Wyman's 32-pound cannons were fired only in practice, on ceremonial occasions, to announce federal victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, Tennessee, and at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in 1862, and the surrender of General Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia in 1865; the guns also tolled every half-hour in memory of Abraham Lincoln on April 19, 1865. United States troops remained in Phelps County through the summer of 1865, dismantling the forts and shipping military surplus to St. Louis, and the post at Rolla was abolished in August 1865. Fort Wyman and the Union garrison also provided a safe haven for thousands of refugees from southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, including women, children, and aged civilians driven from ruined homes by armies, hostile neighbors, guerrillas, and bandits, many of whom depended on army rations at the railhead to survive. The fort was named for Colonel John B. Wyman, whose 13th Illinois Infantry arrived at Rolla on July 17, 1861, remained there until March 1862 except for brief forays, and whose commander later died of wounds received during the failed attack on Chickasaw Bluff, Mississippi, on December 28, 1862. Scale drawings made in 1865 by Captain William Hoelcke showed Fort Wyman as a standard redoubt, a simple rectangle 300 feet square with walls 10 feet high formed from earth excavated from a moat ditch 6 feet deep, a single gate in the north wall with a retractable plank drawbridge, artillery positions at each corner, two log blockhouses for riflemen in the moat connected by log tunnels, and only a log powder magazine, a well, and artillery emplacements inside the walls.
