The Steamboat Dock

A sidewheel steamer lies against a timber wharf built out over shallow water, sheds along its length, the beach running away in the foreground — the steamboat dock on Morris Island, in an albumen print rather than a negative scan.

This is where the siege arrived. Every gun, every shell, every barrel and every man came onto the island across structures like this one, built by Colonel Serrell's New York engineers, and went off the same way. The wharf is the least celebrated and most necessary thing in the whole campaign.