Fort Howell

Fort Howell is a low, grassy, five-sided rampart in the woods off Beach City Road, and from the car park it looks like nothing much. Walk up onto the parapet and the scale corrects itself: a pentagonal enclosed earthwork with walls that still stand something over twenty feet above the ditch after a century and a half of Lowcountry rain, with emplacements cut for a couple of dozen guns.

It was thrown up between August and November 1864 by soldiers of the 32nd United States Colored Infantry and the 144th New York Infantry, under the direction of the Union engineer Captain Charles R. Suter. The 32nd USCI was a roughly 500-strong regiment raised at Camp William Penn outside Philadelphia earlier that year, made up of volunteers from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. The fort is named for Brigadier General Joshua Blackwood Howell, who died in 1864.

What it was built to protect is the reason to come. Two miles or so to the north-east lay Mitchelville, the town founded in 1862 by formerly enslaved people who governed it themselves. Fort Howell covered the approaches to it and to the Union base on the island. Black soldiers, most of them free men from the north, built an earthwork to defend a town of people who had been enslaved in South Carolina until three years earlier. It is difficult to think of a more direct piece of ground anywhere in the state.

The fort never fired a shot in anger. Shortly after finishing it, the 32nd USCI marched to the Battle of Honey Hill on 30 November 1864, about thirty miles inland, and took more than fifty casualties in a Union defeat.

The site is free, open in daylight hours, and cared for by the island's land trust. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011. Interpretive panels at the entrance carry the history; a short path runs to and around the earthworks. Twenty minutes is enough, and they are twenty good minutes.