Shells at the Ordnance Depot

Pyramids of shells ranked along a walled platform, sheds behind, the whole depot squared away — the companion ordnance-depot plate, dated by the Library of Congress to April 1865, the month the war's account was closed.

By April the shells in these stacks had outlived their purpose by two months; Charleston had fallen in February and the guns of the island had gone quiet. What the plate records is the discipline that outlasts the need for it — ammunition kept dressed and counted on an island already turning back into sand.