Fort Jefferson–Gibraltar of the Gulf
SPRING 1898
FORT JEFFERSON–GIBRALTAR OF THE GULF
Sixty-eight miles west of Key West, Florida, lies a cluster of small islands named for the turtles early sailors harvested there. The Dry Tortugas were notable in the 19th century because they lay athwart the main passage for ships rounding Florida into the Gulf of Mexico. With our purchase of Florida from Spain in 1821, the strategic location of these islands attracted the eye of US Army coastal defense planners. By 1846, the Corps of Engineers had begun construction of a massive hexagonal fortification on Garden Key. This “Gibraltar of the Gulf” was to have walls 45 feet high housing three decks of guns. The enclosed grounds would have supported a thousand-man garrison. The walls of Fort Jefferson, as it was named, were completed in 1862, and by virtue of its remoteness, the fort remained in Union hands throughout the Civil War. Its guns were never fired in anger, in fact the largely forgotten fort is best known today for having served as a federal prison. The still unfinished construction was halted in 1875, and for 20 years the military abandoned Fort Jefferson to use as a quarantine station.
But as hostilities with Spain loomed in 1898, renewed interest stirred in Fort Jefferson. Indeed, it was the only installation between Norfolk and Texas with a natural channel deep enough to accommodate the battleships of the day. Our Navy began further dredging in the spring of 1898, and construction commenced on two large coaling docks. The fort serviced deep draft battleships throughout the Spanish-American War as an auxiliary to the Key West Naval Station. Modern charts bear remembrances of this era of Naval occupation. “Iowa Rock” and “Texas Rock” mark spots where at least two turn-of-the-century battleships ran afoul.
So successful was the coaling operation at Fort Jefferson, that the Navy purchased the installation outright in 1900. For the next eight years the Fort was garrisoned by a small contingent of US Marines, for whom the remote posting must have seemed as much a punishment. In 1908 however, the coaling operations and an unfinished seawater distillation plant were removed to Guantanamo Bay. Navy interest revived briefly in WWI and again in WWII, when Fort Jefferson was occupied as a base for seaplanes conducting anti-U-boat patrols.
On 4 January 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt set aside the Dry Tortugas and Fort Jefferson as a National Park Service installation, by whose hands the property is now administered. Fort Jefferson is one of our most remote and least visited National Park sites; access can only be gained via boat service out of Key West.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 20 MAY 24
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Bethel, Rodman. A Slumbering Giant of the Past: Fort Jefferson, U.S.A. in the Dry Tortugas. Hialeah, FL: W.L. Litho, 1979.
Site visit, Fort Jefferson and Dry Tortugas National Par, August 1995.
USS Tortuga (LSD-46) website. www.spear.navy.mil/ships/lsd46/ seal.htm, retrieved 22 June 1999.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Fort Jefferson is best known for having served as a federal prison, both during the Civil War for Confederate POWs and in the post-Civil War period. Its most famous inmate by far was Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, the physician convicted as a co-conspirator with John Wilkes Booth in the Lincoln assassination after it was discovered that Mudd had set Booth’s broken fibula the morning following the Ford’s Theatre shooting. Controversy persists today as to whether Mudd actually conspired or was simply a country doctor awakened by an unknown patient at his door. Regardless, Mudd was pardoned in 1869 by President Andrew Johnson after Mudd worked tirelessly to minister to fellow prisoners during a yellow fever outbreak in 1867.
Today the remains of Navy occupation are still visible. The pilings for the north and south coal docks remain, as does the concrete flooring for the eight large coal storage bunkers.
The ship’s seal of our modern Whidbey Island-class amphibious assault ship TORTUGA (LSD-46) bears a configuration representing Fort Jefferson, as well as two Parrott rifles, representing the Civil War-era guns of this fort.
The Dry Tortugas were named by Juan Ponce de Leon when he stopped there in 1513 to harvest 160 turtles for food. They are “dry” because they lack surface fresh water.
