{"id":8677,"date":"2017-03-16T04:42:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T04:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/?p=8677"},"modified":"2017-03-14T04:42:13","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T04:42:13","slug":"a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the-beach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.towingsilver.com\/?p=8677","title":{"rendered":"A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Beach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, maybe it wasn’t all that funny.<\/p>\n

I decided I wanted to see the ocean while I was in Savannah, and I decided to take a drive out to Tybee Island. I was tooling down the road and saw a sign for Fort Pulaski National Monument, and I decided to investigate.<\/p>\n

I stopped into the visit center and discovered that Fort Pulaski was pivotal in the Civil War. It was the first time that the Union Army successfully tested rifled cannon. They were so accurate that they made brick fortifications obsolete.<\/p>\n

That is really something, when you consider that the walls were eleven feet thick.<\/p>\n

I entered the fort through the demilune, which is kind of like a little island in front of the portcullis.<\/p>\n

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A moat ran all the way around the fort.<\/p>\n

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I crossed over.<\/p>\n

Back when the fort was built in 1847, this area was used as a kitchen and apparently as general storage.<\/p>\n

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Now a days, there is a magazine.<\/p>\n

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When the technology advances, it became unsafe to store the ammunition inside the fort.<\/p>\n

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I wended my way through the demilune and crossed the drawbridge into the fort.<\/p>\n

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I spent time prowling around the fort. It was much like many of the other forts that were built as part of the Third System of coastal fortifications that were planned after the War of 1812. According to my sources (okay – Wikipedia) most of the nearly thirty Third System forts built after 1816 still exist along either the Atlantic or Gulf coasts.<\/p>\n

The construction of Fort Pulaski began in 1829. It was named in honor of Kazimierz Polaski, a Polish soldier and military commander who fought in the American Revolution under the command of George Washington.<\/p>\n

Pulaski Day was always a big thing in Western New York. That was part of the reason I was eager to visit the fort.<\/p>\n