Fort Fisher historian Becky Sawyer will share the gritty history of tattoos that adorned sailors who fought in the 1865 battle that ended with the capture of the last open port in North Carolina and the Confederacy.

Sawyer will dive into the results of five years of research on tattoos worn by the sailors who participated in the Battle of Fort Fisher during a presentation entitled “Red, Blue & Black Tattoos Among Sailors at Fort Fisher.” The event is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. Monday at the New Hanover County Public Library’s main library at 230 Grace St. in Wilmington.

Through images and stories, Sawyer will “explore this fascinating and sometimes gritty aspect of maritime history. Not for the faint of heart,” according to the library.

In mid-January 1865, joint Army and Navy forces commanded by Union Rear Adm. David D. Porter and Maj. Gen. Alfred Terry attacked and captured the fort situated at the mouth of the Cape Fear River at the Atlantic Ocean.

Fort Fisher State Historic Site has scheduled a daylong living history event for Saturday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of World War II ending.

The program begins at 9 a.m. Saturday with a military vehicle convoy that will travel from Fort Fisher to Kure Beach and back. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., there will be living history displays with military and civilian reenactors on the green between the visitor center and earthworks, a period field kitchen, and numerous historic military vehicles.

A full event schedule is available on Fort Fisher State Historic Site’s website and social media. Parking is available at the visitor center.

Situated near the Cape Fear River, the site was a Confederate fort that defended the Wilmington port during the American Civil War. During World War II, antiaircraft artillery soldiers trained at the site on various weaponry starting in October 1941 to prepare for deployment. Between the post’s opening and its closing in 1944, more than 40 battalions trained at Fort Fisher, according to North Carolina Historic Sites, under the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Fort Fisher State Historic Site plans to resume its annual summer artillery program after a two-year pause for a construction project.

The event is scheduled for 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. Saturday, June 21, at the historic site. Parking is available at the visitor center in Kure Beach. A food truck will be on site during the program begin offered at no charge.

“Known as the Gibraltar of the South, Fort Fisher protected the port of Wilmington during the American Civil War until it fell to U.S. forces in January 1865. In 1962, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark,” according to the state.

There will be 19th-century artillery demonstrations at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m. and ongoing living history demonstrations and displays. Retired Col. Wade Sokolosky will lecture on his book “North Carolina’s Confederate Hospitals, 1864-1865: Volume 2″ at 1:30 p.m.

A full event schedule is available on Fort Fisher State Historic Site’s website and social media channels.

Fort Fisher is administered by the Division of State Historic Sites within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The 160th anniversary of U.S. forces capturing Fort Fisher will be recognized later this month with living history demonstrations and programs.

The daylong commemoration of the January 1865 capture is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 18, at Fort Fisher State Historic Site in Kure Beach.

Activities include 19th century weapons demonstrations at 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., and 4 p.m., as well as ongoing living history demonstrations and displays. Civil War historians are scheduled to speak throughout the day about Fort Fisher and the Wilmington Campaign. The schedule is available online.

The Department of Natural and Cultural Resources manages the Fort Fisher State Historic Site, which “played a crucial role in the Confederacy’s defense of the port of Wilmington, which was vital for maintaining supply lines.”

The commemoration is the first major event for Fort Fisher State Historic Site since opening a new 20,000-square-foot visitor center and reconstructed earthworks late last year, organizers said.

The site features a variety of tours, exhibitions and educational programs that explore the fort’s strategic importance, the battles fought there and the soldier’s daily life.

Admission to the event is free. Parking is available at the visitor center. Concessions will be provided by the Federal Point History Center.

As a safety measure, Fort Fisher State Historic Site in Kure Beach will temporarily close to visitors starting Tuesday while exhibits, artifacts and staff offices are moved to the new 20,000-square-foot visitor center.

Plans are to reopen the site in phases over the summer.

North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources’ Division of State Historic Sites officials announced the temporary closure earlier this week for the facilities west of U.S. Highway 421. Those include the museum, restrooms, tour trails and parking lots.

Fort Fisher protected the Wilmington port during the Civil War, until it fell to U.S. forces in January 1865. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. The original visitor center was built to accommodate an expected 25,000 people a year. Fort Fisher now sees annually more than a million visitors.

As the new visitor center nears completion, restoration work is expected to begin of the earthworks demolished during World War II to build an airstrip, when the site served as a training base.

During the closure, the public will have access to the Battle Acre tour stop across the highway from the visitor center along the oceanfront.

KURE BEACH – It became evident that the visitor center at Fort Fisher State Historic Site had outgrown itself some time ago.

By the mid-2000s, the Civil War fort was drawing 600,000 visitors each year.

“In 2021, we finally exceeded 1 million visitors,” site manager Jim Steele said.

That number clearly wasn’t in mind when the site’s visitor center was designed more than a half-century ago.

The center, which been sitting since 1965 at the entrance to the historic site at the southern end of Pleasure Island in New Hanover County, was designed for 25,000 visitors a year.

After more than a decade of planning and fundraising, Fort Fisher is undertaking a project that includes a new center, one three times larger than the current building, to house updated exhibits in an open, airy indoor space that will offer views of the natural, picturesque landscape nestled at the mouth of the Cape Fear River at the Atlantic Ocean.

Officials, including N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Secretary Reid Wilson, recently took a “hard-hat tour” of the new visitor center site.

Wilson said that when he became chief deputy secretary of the state natural and cultural resources department in 2017, the push to build a new visitor center at Fort Fisher was “one of the first things I heard about.”

“This is a beautiful spot with a rich and complex history,” he said. “I’m here eager to learn how all this is going.”

Though work kicked off about six months ago, there’s little to actually see of the new building. The tops of concrete pilings driven 50 feet deep into the ground jut from what looks like freshly dug earth.

Those pilings alone took the better part of two months to install, and they are the foundation of what will be a two-story building built to endure hurricane-strength winds and flooding associated with coastal storms.

There will be glass, lots of glass, to let natural light into the building and offer an unobstructed view of the fort’s earthen structures from the parking lot.

Upstairs, visitors will be able to travel back in time as they peruse the artifacts in the main exhibit space. Glass walls will offer views ocean and natural landscape, one peppered by live oaks from the river banks to just before the ocean shore.

There will be a 120-person capacity multipurpose room available to rent, a gift shop overlooking the fort’s earthworks, a second-story balcony, a theater that will sit 100 people, and a changeable exhibit gallery of artifacts from the North Carolina Underwater Archeology Center.

The underwater archeology center, or UAC, is housed at Fort Fisher in a series of buildings, some built during World War II. A new lab is also under construction several yards from the visitor center. The lab is not open to the public.

The new visitor center and archaeology facility carry a price tag of $25.5 million, funds primarily secured through state budget appropriations.

Nearly $3 million more is needed to complete the overall site improvement project, which includes reconstruction of a series of Civil War-era mounds. To clear the site for a runway, the Army bulldozed three of the mounds after activating Fort Fisher as a training base during World War II. A fourth mound was taken out during construction of U.S. 421, which ends at the N.C. Department of Transportation’s Fort Fisher ferry terminal.

“Right now this is the only part of the project that’s not funded yet,” Steele said.

The idea is to tell a complete and inclusive history of Fort Fisher, one where reconstructed underground bunkers will give visitors a real sense life in a Confederate fort, one built of mostly earth and sand by soldiers and more than 500 free and enslaved African Americans.

Construction of the visitor center is expected to be complete in mid- to late May 2024. Once the building is open to the public, the current center is to be torn down.

Fort Fisher State Historic Site is commemorating its 158th anniversary 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday with the program, “With Artillery, War is Made.”

The free living history program will focus on the artillery at Fort Fisher during the American Civil War.

At 10 a.m., noon, 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m., there will be demonstrations of the 32-pound banded and rifled seacoast gun, the 12-pound Napoleon, and a 10-pound Parrott gun.

Curator of History Ray Flowers will present “The Sword of Fort Fisher” in the visitor center auditorium at both 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. that day. Seating will be limited. 

Visitors will also be able to view living history displays set up in the Fort Grove.

Due to new visitor center construction, visitors are encouraged to park at Battle Acre, or the temporary lot south of the museum. Accessible parking is limited to two spaces just north of the museum.

Fort Fisher kept North Carolina’s port of Wilmington open to blockade-runners supplying necessary goods to Confederate armies inland until the last few months of the Civil War, according to state Historic Sites. By 1865, the supply line through Wilmington was the last remaining supply route open to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. When Fort Fisher fell after a massive federal amphibious assault on Jan. 15, 1865, its defeat helped seal the fate of the Confederacy.

Updated Nov. 9:

Due to a forecast of inclement weather from Tropical Storm Nicole, the groundbreaking ceremony at Fort Fisher State Historic Site, originally scheduled for Thursday has been postponed. A new date and time for the event will be announced, officials said Wednesday.

Original post:

A groundbreaking ceremony is set to take place at Fort Fisher State Historic Site at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10 to mark the start of construction of a new visitor center and conservation lab for the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Office of State Archaeology.

Located at 1610 Fort Fisher Blvd. S, Kure Beach, Fort Fisher is part of the Division of State Historic Sites in the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Attendees at the groundbreaking are expected to include Secretary D. Reid Wilson of the Department of Natural of Cultural Resources, members of the North Carolina General Assembly and members of the Friends of Fort Fisher. Light refreshments will be served.

Construction is expected to be completed in April 2024. The new facilities is estimated to cost about $25.5 million, most of which has been appropriated by the General Assembly since 2016.

In planning since 2010, the new visitor center is to be 22,000 square feet, three times the size of the existing facility built in 1965.

The new visitor center will have nearly double the museum exhibit space, plus amenities such as a 100-seat orientation theater and a multipurpose room suitable for rental and educational activities such as wedding receptions and classroom instruction.

With funding now secured, work can move forward on new facilities at Fort Fisher State Historic Site in Kure Beach.

Budgeted at $25.5 million, the project includes a new interpretive center for museum exhibits, which will be almost three times larger than the 1965 building in use today, and a new conservation lab for the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Office of State Archaeology.

In addition, The Friends of Fort Fisher Inc., the nonprofit that supports this historic site, plans to begin a capital campaign June 11 to fund the reconstruction of the site’s earthen ramparts demolished during World War II for the construction of an airstrip.

North Carolina Historic Sites, a group of 27 historic sites under the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, announced Tuesday that the full funding amount for the project had been secured, most of which was appropriated over several budget years.

Fort Fisher kept the North Carolina Port of Wilmington open to blockade-runners supplying necessary goods to Confederate armies inland until the last few months of the Civil War, when it fell after a massive federal amphibious assault Jan. 15, 1865, according to the state Historic Sites. The site also played a part during World War II.

The Friends group has played a large part in the yearslong planning process and in obtaining funding for the new facilities, officials said.

“This funding, secured in no small part through the amazing work of the Friends of Fort Fisher and our site staff, will provide a powerful opportunity to tell a more inclusive and transformative story of this land and all that it witnessed,” said Michelle Lanier, director of the Division of State Historic Sites, in a statement.

Historic site manager Jim Steele explained that the new interpretive center and restored earthworks will be welcome additions to Fort Fisher.

“The exhibits will cover Fort Fisher history in a broad, all-inclusive manner and feature something for every visitor,” Steele said in a statement. “Visitation at Fort Fisher now exceeds one million visitors a year, and it is time for facilities that can accommodate such crowds and for historical interpretation that sets new standards in museum exhibits and scholarship.”