The Gun Under the Palmetto

A banded rifle on Fort Moultrie's parapet, men working and resting around it, and over the whole scene a single palmetto leaning in from the left — the tree of the state flag growing wild on the fort the flag was made famous by.

Three copies of this photograph survive in the staged material: the stereograph's two halves, and an albumen print pasted into an album page titled April 1865, its mount pencilled with the plate number 3477. The print is how most people ever saw these views — negatives became cards and album sheets, and the album's date is as close as the series comes to telling us when the photographer climbed this parapet.