Joseph Ryder Lewis Jr. was a Carolina Beach resident, U.S. Army veteran, and member of the Federal Point Historic Preservation Society who donated twelve acres containing Confederate earthworks of the so-called Sugar Loaf lines to the Town of Carolina Beach for a public Civil War park. The Sugar Loaf lines served as auxiliary defenses to Fort Fisher four and a half miles to the south and also helped guard Wilmington, North Carolina, the South's main seaport for maritime trade with Europe and, by late 1864, the Confederacy's most important city. Confederate blockade-runners smuggled vital military supplies for General Robert E. Lee's forces in Virginia, as well as goods for civilians, through the U.S. Navy's blockade of Southern seaports, with Great Britain as the Confederacy's major trading partner. To protect this business, engineers built a vast network of forts and batteries at the mouth of the Cape Fear River and along beaches and river shores in New Hanover and Brunswick Counties. Fort Fisher, guarding the northern entryway into the river at New Inlet, became the strongest and best armed seacoast fortification in North America. As Union forces prepared to attack Fort Fisher in the autumn of 1864, Major General W.H.C. Whiting, commander of the Department of the Cape Fear, expanded existing defenses and chose a strong position on Federal Point, from the headwaters of Myrtle Grove Sound, now the Carolina Beach canal, to Sugar Loaf Hill on the east bank of the Cape Fear River, for an extensive line of fieldworks that would play an important role in the Wilmington Campaign of 1864-1865.