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Finally, Repairs Are Holding Down The Fort

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The Associated Press

Published: November 25, 2007

KEY WEST - Repairs to restore sections of historic Fort Jefferson are under way after a two-year delay attributed to hurricanes.

The National Park Service embarked this month on a three-year, $6 million project to refurbish the fort's wall with thousands of special bricks.

Contractors and masons will work on two walls of the six-sided fort that's part of Dry Tortugas National Park, a collection of islands about 70 miles west of Key West in the Gulf of Mexico. Workers will open the face of the walls from the waterline to the top of the 45-foot fort, stabilize them and re-lay the bricks.

Most of the existing brick will be reused, but Mike Jester, lead facility manager for Dry Tortugas, estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 new bricks may be needed. Instead of using regular bricks, the park service will buy bricks that replicate materials used when construction began on the fort in 1846. The mortar will be made of sand dredged from beaches on area islands, officials said.

"Preserving the historic fabric is key to keeping Fort Jefferson, Fort Jefferson," said exhibits specialist Kelly Clark.

The repairs are the second phase of a project that was supposed to start in 2005, but was delayed by busy hurricane seasons. The first phase recently was completed, with the installation of 17 shutters made of reinforced concrete.

Most parts of the fort will remain open to visitors during the repairs. Two ferries and a seaplane travel to the island every day.

The fort is on a string of coral islands discovered by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513. After the area became a territory of the United States, the location became valuable for protecting the shipping lanes of the Straits of Florida and defending the Gulf Coast.

Fort construction began in 1846 and continued for three decades but was never finished. The invention of the rifled cannon made the walls penetrable and the fort obsolete.

During the Civil War, the location was used as a staging area by Union warships and as a military prison.

The fort and the surrounding islands were designated a wildlife refuge in 1908 and Fort Jefferson National Monument in 1935. In 1992, the area was renamed Dry Tortugas National Park.

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