ONE USED FORT
It has had at least three names.
The original drawings for a much-needed fort to be built out near the middle of the main channel of Hampton Roads, Virginia, were all labeled ”Castle Calhoun.”
Andrew Jackson was President at that time and while the place was under construction he used it as a summer White House and get-away spot for several years. For a brief time, a young engineer by the name of Robert E. Lee was on the staff as one of those charged with creating an island for in the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and with placing thereon a sizable fortification. Both the army and navy did not like to recall that the national capital had been attacked – not once, but twice - by British warships which sailed past this very spot on their way into the Chesapeake Bay area.
Work started on the fort in 1818 when not too many islands that size had been constructed so it took a while.. In more recent island building islands Japan used compacted urban waste in hundred pound “bricks”, but the builders of the island in the Chesapeake Bay used rock ...mostly granite - and they kept dumping more and more rock until, finally, an “island” began to show. The average depths at the site measured from ten to eighteen feet in depth - almost three fathoms - and the rock and concrete they poured in - an estimated l.2 million cubic feet of the hard stuff - tended to go to the bottom and keep sinking. Five years after they started the island measured about seven feet above the surface. It took three years more for it to settle. Work was started, but had to be stopped indefinitely when newly build walls split as their foundations sank at a rate of about seven inches per year. It was in this phase, it is said, that Robert E. Lee no doubt, shared some worry with other young engineers on duty Certainly, it was in no condition to support extensive fortifications.
The original design was by a Frenchman Simon Bernard. The fort was attached to Fort Monroe on the mainland north of the site about a mile in an administrative sense. Fort Monroe was the largest masonry fortification ever built in the United States and that influenced the name given to the new, extended fortification supplementing Fort Monroe. The old designation honored John Calhoun, President Monroe's Secretary of War, who was deemed to be a southern sympathizer. Several names were. It could have been Fort Scott for General Winfield Scott,of Mexican War fame but , instead General John Ellis Wool, also a Mexican War hero and commandeer of Fort Monroe at time.
When I was just a young kid in Norfolk, Va. we spoke of the place as ”The Rip-Raps”. I have no memories of our ever having called it “Fort Wool.” That name came to be during the Civil War when it came under Union control and occupancy. Those in command were perturbed when the Confederate “Virginia” went safely past it to attack the Federal fleet off shore. Furthermore, it passed the fort on returning to its base in Norfolk, an suffered no damage whatsoever even from the firing of Fort Wool's celebrated new gun called “The Sawyer”. It is said that radar personnel stationed on the rocky little island during World War II called it “The Rock” - suggesting an Alcatraz-like state of isolation.
Today, the “Rip-Raps” is a public park area. It was given to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1967 and then, in turn, to the City of Hampton in 1970. Much of the original structure remains, but not all of the island is used because portions of it are declared to be unsafe. The reason: the island is still “settling” and , it is assumed, will - in time - sink beneath the waters and be no more.
A.L.M. October 12, 2004 [c665wds]
