Shot at the Magazines

Two magazine mounds inside Fort Putnam, photographed across an empty stretch of parade. At the foot of each, stacked on timber platforms cut into the slope, sit pyramids of shot and shell — course above course, squared away like goods on a shelf. Not a person is in the frame.

The Library of Congress credits the negative to Sam A. Cooley, the photographer who worked the Department of the South for the Federal army, and dates it 1865; his portrait is published elsewhere in this collection. It is an orderly picture of an orderly system: the ammunition lives beside the magazine, in the open air and off the sand, where a gun crew can come at it without a lamp going anywhere near the powder.

Every round in the stacks came ashore over the beach or the engineers' wharves and was carried up the island by hand and by cart. The emptiness of the parade is the truthful part: by 1865 this fort's war was routine, and routine is what the plate records.