9th Installment - June 25 Charleston, SC and Fort Sumter

9^th Installment -  June 25 Charleston, SC and Fort Sumter

This morning we drove in to Charleston to go to Fort Sumter.  There are 2 locations where you can take a ferry out to the Fort which is built on an island that guards the entrance to Charleston Harbor.  One ferry landing is in downtown Charleston and the other is across the Harbor in Mt. Pleasant at the USS Yorktown (an aircraft carrier) State Park.  The Yorktown has a museum on it about Medal of Honor wianners.  We didn’t go aboard or visit the museum which would have been another $25 a head or so for the opportunity, and it would have been too much for Reyna to hike up and down and around the decks anyway.  .

We crossed this bridge to get over to Mt. Pleasant from Charleston.



USS Yorktown




The small bump on the horizon in the middle of the picture is the island with Fort Sumter guarding the entrance to the Charleston Harbor





The black building with the flags on top was not part of the original Fort.




The flat stones in the foreground are part of the original wharf landing from when the Fort was built.



  



This is the Battle Flag that flew over Ft. Sumter during the bombardment.  It's 10' x 20'.  The Confederate General P G T Beauregard permitted Major Anderson, the Union commander, to take the Flag with him when the Federal forces evacuated the fort.



While wandering about the Fort and reading one of the many plaques about the battle, I came to one that described how Union forces had managed to fire only a hundred rounds or so while the Confederates bombarded the Fort with several thousand over some 34 hours before the Union forces evacuated the Fort and surrendered it to the Confederates.  The Confederates were said to have cheered and admired the courage of the Union defenders, but I guess not everybody heard that part of the story because I overheard a young woman tell her friends that “we” really kicked the you know what out of “them”. 
Amazingly, there were no casualties on either side during the battle.  The only death on either side occurred on the next day. One of the Union commander’s conditions for giving up the Fort had been the right to fire a 100 gun salute to the flag. Half way through the salute a gun exploded, killing Private Daniel Hough, making him the first casualty of the Civil War.
We returned to Mt. Pleasant and while looking for a place to have lunch, I finally saw a shoe repair place.  I’d been looking for one for weeks to get the straps on my sandals stitched before they came completely apart.  Typical of many small kindnesses that we have experienced on this trip, the Korean proprietress (she is seamstress and husband does the shoes in their shop) told me they’d be ready in 3 days, but when I explained that we were tourists just passing through, she agreed to repair my sandals right away which I really appreciated.

After having lunch, and retrieving my wonderfully repaired sandals, Reyna and I went to downtown Charleston to check out more antebellum houses.  There is a seawall with a wide sidewalk/boardwalk across the street from these homes.  It is about 10' above street level.  It's accessible via stairs, so I parked and took a little walk to take these pictures instead of my usual drive by snaps.  Being in the breeze right at the Harbor was nice place to be considering the heat and humidity we were otherwise experiencing in Charleston.  Was looking forward to going back to our campground and the Splash Zone. :)

Lucky to find convenient parking place. 

By now, Reyna and I were pretty tired of viewing “old” houses no matter their historic import or style, so we returned to our campground and spent an hour or so cooling off at the Splash Zone.  Really, really like the waterfall massage.  Tomorrow we’re on our way west to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and then the

Blue Ridge Parkway

beckons.