Fort McRee

Fort McRee once stood across Pensacola Bay at the end of Perdido Key, built by the U.S. Army in the early 1840s to help protect Pensacola Bay. In January 1861, three months before the war started at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the U.S. Army abandoned Barrancas and Fort McRee and consolidated its troops at Fort Pickens, and the governors of Alabama and Florida quickly dispatched state militias to occupy the vacant military posts. In a massive artillery exchange with the Confederates in November, cannon fire from two Union ships and Fort Pickens nearly demolished Fort McRee. Considered obsolete by the end of the Civil War, Fort McRee was never repaired, and years after the battle its ruins crumbled into the sand and the Gulf of Mexico.

Warrington, Florida · United States