I'll give you the brief description and snippets of history, there is SO much about this fort I could share!
The group of islands that the fort sit on is called the Dry Tortugas - when Ponce de Leon discovered the group of islands in the 1500s, he noticed the abundance of Turtles (Tortugas in Spanish!). It's called "Dry" because it is just that...DRY. They're sandy islands with little else on them, unles they're plants that can drink in the salty water.
Spain sold Florida to the US in the 1820s, which included The Florida Keys for $5m. The Tortugas were inspected in the mid 1820s with the idea of building Defensive Naval locations for protection against pirates, but were found unsuitable. They did however build a lighthouse on Garden Key (upon which the fort now sits) that was only 4m high. Not a very GOOD lighthouse, given the number of shipwrecks in the area.
IN 1829, the area was visited again by a different guy, and he had the opposite idea - perfect spot for a Naval fort. The design was for a 6-sided, 3-storey, 410 gun fort, and is made with over 16 MILLION bricks. Each corner had a bastion, to provide defensive fire along each of the walls. However, they didn't start building until the 1840s. Building was slow, since they had to ship the materials and water in.
The fort was designed to have cisterns in the walls of the fort that would filter rainwater through the sand, only the weight caused subsidence and cracked the cisterns. The other idea was that the sewerage would be pumped into the moat around the fort, with a "natural" flushing system using the tides to flush out the moat. Only they didn't quite engineer it correctly to account for the only slight change in water level.
The building continued into the Civil War years - a story told to us during the tour was that the fort was in Union hands, and a confederate ship docked at the fort. The head honcho at the fort at the time told the Captain of the ship to get back on his ship and leave - at that moment the fort had over 100 guns trained on the ship. So the Captain turned on his heel and left. Little did he know, although there over 100 guns inside the fort at that time, they certainly weren't in place in the casemates, and neither did they have any ammunition!
The war also affected the supply of brick to the fort. Originally the brick was coming from one area, which was in a Confederate state, so they had to change brick supplier (which is why there are two colours of brick!). The fort, during it's construction also housed a number of Military prisoners, and later, general prisoners. The most famous was Dr Mudd, who apparently helped out the guy that shot Abraham Lincoln, along with 3 other alleged conspirators. Dr Mudd eventually assisted treating the large number of people on the island that ended up with Yellow Fever.
The inside of the fort houses 2 magazines (5 were planned, only 2 built), a shot heater (heated up the cannon balls), and military housing - most of which was torn down in the 1960s due to it being unsafe. This brick has been used to repair the fort - it gets battered by hurricanes on a regular basis. The fort itself was never finished, and construction stopped in 1875. By 1888 it abandoned as a Military installation, as the guns it used were already outdated, the fort itself would not stand up to newer weaponry, the costs of mainting the site was too high (due to exposure to the elements). It was used as a prison and a quarantine station, before being declared as a national monument in the 1930s, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970s and then a National Park in the 1990s.
Now onto the pictures!
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