The Battle of Sullivan’s Island was part of Great Britain’s first attempt to take the city of Charleston, South Carolina.

Unfortunately for the British, too many things went wrong for them, and there were logistical problems that they somehow hadn’t accounted for as well.

Sullivan’s Island was (is, really) not an impressive piece of land. It’s a barrier island that’s a couple of miles long but only a couple of hundred feet wide. But because of its location at the mouth of Charleston Bay, it was an ideal place from which to defend the city.

Now, if you look at a modern-day map of the bay, you’ll see Fort Sumter in the dead center of the bay’s channel. Fort Sumter, however, was little more than a sand bar in 1776, and was artificially built up in the 1830s so that the fort could be constructed there. Insterestingly, although Fort Sumter gets credit for the first shots of the Civil War, the structure was never finished. Construction began in 1829 and hadn’t been completed as of 1861, when the war started.

Oddly enough, when the Battle of Sullivan’s Island took place, Fort Moultrie wasn’t completed either. Then in 1798 the Army decided that it needed updating, so they started over, building a new structure atop the old one. That fort was destroyed in a storm in 1804 and was rebuilt again in 1809. During the Civil War it was reduced to rubble by Union forces but was rebuilt again in the 1870s.

Fort Moultrie was taken out of service in 1947, then decommissioned and became part of the National Park Service in 1960.

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