The Sign on the Magazine

On the crest of the magazine mound, planted in the sod among the weeds, stands a neat white signboard with ornamented lettering: FORT PUTNAM. Below it the work goes about its business — a gun on the parapet at the right, shot pyramids at the left, heavy timber and a spare wheel lying in the sand.

The sign is the whole history of this ground in two words. The Confederates built and held it as Battery Gregg; when they slipped away on the night of 6–7 September 1863 the Federals took it over, and by the end of October Gillmore was reporting to Halleck that the breaching guns in Wagner and Gregg — renamed Fort Strong and Fort Putnam — had done all he could desire against the southeast face of Fort Sumter. Somebody then painted the new name properly, with serifs and flourishes, and set it where every visitor and every photographer would find it.

Which is the point: this is a photograph of an army labeling its conquest. The garrison that put the board up kept the guns below it firing on Sumter and the city for the rest of the war.