The Covered Way

A covered way runs between sodded traverses — gabions and sharpened stakes lining the cut, a round shot sitting on a post like a finial, and above the far parapet the bare masts of a vessel riding close inshore. An albumen print from the April 1865 album page, its mount pencilled 4392.

The masts are the touch that dates the scene better than any caption: ships stand off Sullivan's Island in the open, unhurried, over the works of a fort that spent four years making that impossible. Like its neighbors numbered in the 4380s and 4390s, this print reproduces a negative that was never part of the staged material and survives here only as the album panel.