The Landing

Wagons and horses work a landing place at the water's edge — a steamer beyond, tents at the left, the beach churned into ruts. A Haas & Peale plate of the siege's logistics in the summer of 1863.

Everything the batteries fired and the sappers dug with crossed a beach like this one. Colonel Serrell's New York engineers built the wharves and roads that made it possible; the wagons in this frame are the system at work, in the weeks when the island's appetite for shell and timber was at its highest.