Battery Cavallo | military, artillery battery, interesting place

 military, artillery battery, interesting place

The United States Army learned many hard lessons during the Civil War, and one of the hardest was that all the nation's permanent fortifications had become obsolete. Multi-tiered masonry forts (such as Fort Point) had proven themselves in battle to be little more than oversized targets for artillerymen. At the end of the War, the Army realized it needed to radically redesign all its forts. Today, hidden away at Fort Baker, is a pristine example of the military designers' solution to that post-Civil War dilemma: the earthwork fortification of Battery Cavallo.

Prior to the Civil War, the Army's Corps of Engineers constructed dozens of brick and masonry fortifications around the nation's harbors and rivers. More than thirty of these defensive "works" (as the military called them) dotted the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, and two had even been erected in far-off California at Fort Point and Alcatraz Island. But in their efforts to place larger numbers of cannon in single structures, the Engineers had begun constructing forts several stories high. As the forts became taller they also became easier targets for gunners.

During the late 1860s, the Army experimented with various ways to "bomb proof" existing forts. Proposals ranged from hanging metal plates on their exterior faces to replacing them entirely with rotating iron gun turrets. More conservative Engineers, however, studied Civil War battlefields where dirt earthworks had been extensively used. These improvised fortifications, they noted, had been simple to build, provided excellent protection against enemy fire, and were easy to maintain and repair. Earthworks, they decided, would become be the basis of the next generation of permanent American forts.

The Army's standardized designs, known as "The Plan of 1870," called for cannon to be mounted in low-profile earthwork batteries with each pair of guns separated from the next by artificial hills called "traverses." Within the traverses would be masonry magazines, store rooms and tunnels for moving troops and supplies.

www.militarymuseum.org/BtyCavallo.html
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