Civil War Fort Curtis was built in Helena in 1862 as a temporary field fortification, with hundreds of refugee slaves pressed into labor and men using hand tools completing it in three months. Its massive earthen walls, parade ground, and guns reflected the might of the Union army and the changes Union occupation brought to the city, where soldiers drilled and stood for inspection. In 1992, Ronnie Nichols, then director of the Delta Cultural Center, first proposed a reconstruction, and twenty years later that vision was realized when New Fort Curtis was dedicated on May 11, 2012. The reconstruction was not an exact copy of the original because highly erodible soil required changes to make it permanent, the lot was somewhat smaller than the original fort, and for safety reasons no ditch encircled it. Contractors brought in roughly 600 truck loads of soil, and although no earth-moving equipment existed in Helena in 1862, bulldozers pushed truck loads of soil into place in 2011 and contractors using power equipment took five months to build New Fort Curtis.