Fort Caroline National Memorial (FL)
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Fort Caroline National Memorial Map
Fort Caroline National Memorial, with major sites from the album highlighted, as depicted a la Google Earth...
Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve Visitor Center
The visitor center center located adjacent to the fort serves as the main center for the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve, a 46,000 acre preserve of which the Fort is only a small part...
Fort Caroline National Memorial
It seemed almost every tree here was draped in a thick blanket of spanish moss...
The visitor center had a fascinating collection of artifacts...fascinating due to the fact that they come from such an unfamiliar era to me...
The fort itself is a short walk through the woods from the visitor center...
Fort Caroline National Memorial
Spanish moss seemed to be almost dripping down from the massive arms of this overhanging live oak...
On the way to the fort the trail passes a reconstruction of a small native hut representative of what would have been found in the region at the time of the forts existence...
Approaching Fort de la Caroline...
Shaped like a triangle, the main arched entrance to the fort is along the fort's earthen, southeastern, wall...
The reconstructed fort has been built based upon a sketch of Fort de la Caroline from the period...
The high arched gateway to the fort...
A replica period cannon guards the approaches to the entrance of the fort...
The French Fleur-de-Lis flies above the fort's other landward wall. The shallow moat surrounding the fort can also be seen...
Grassy berms allow access to the fort's three bastions, where cannon would have been placed...
The seaward wall of the fort was wooden, for reasons unexplained to me. I kind of gave the fort an unfinished feeling...
Though today's reconstructed fort is quite empty inside at the time there would have been a small barracks and/or a number of huts. Some 200-or-so soldiers would have garrisoned the fort at the time...
Looking northwest along the palisade wall with the St. Johns River to the right...
Looking across the interior of the fort from the northwest bastion. The trellis-type structure in the center contains a plaque in honor of the French settlers who first founded Fort de la Caroline...
The interior of the palisade wall. By the looks of the original sketch, the poles along it were actually attached to the wall itself with wooden braces and cross-beams, making it much more robust...
Looking 400 Years into the Future
The nuclear-styled towers of a neighboring power plant across the St. Johns River form an odd backdrop to the 16th Century fort...
Looking downstream, this would have been the direction that French (and later, Spanish) vessels would have sailed from to reach the fort...
Standing outside the southwest bastion of the fort. The moat, like most forts in this region, is fed by a short canal which could be opened to flood it when necessary. Unfortunately, these small moats couldn't protect the fort's defenders from the Spanish attack of 1565.
