The First Capital: Fort Louis de la Louisiane

The settlement that became Mobile was not born on this shore. Its first breath came two miles north of here, in the spring of seventeen hundred and two, when Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville directed the construction of Fort Louis de la Louisiane along the northern bend of the river. France had sent his older brother, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, to plant a permanent stake in the lower Mississippi valley and seal off British expansion from the Carolinas. Bienville was twenty-two years old. The river he built upon kept flooding. By seventeen eleven, the settlement had to move south to higher ground, to the site you are near now.

For nearly a decade, this outpost in the humid pinewoods served as the administrative capital of an enormous colonial claim, the whole of French Louisiana, stretching from the Gulf to the Great Lakes. A Roman Catholic parish was established here on July twentieth, seventeen hundred and three, the first French Catholic parish on the Gulf Coast. The colony was learning the hard way what this coast demanded. In seventeen hundred and four, yellow fever swept through Fort Louis and killed forty of the two hundred and twenty-five settlers, among them Henri de Tonti, the Italian-born soldier known across the frontier as Tonti of the Iron Hand.

The rebuilt fort on this site, begun in seventeen twenty-three from brick and stone, was named Fort Conde, in honor of the Prince of Conde. It changed hands without firing a shot more than once. The French held it until seventeen sixty-three, when the Treaty of Paris handed it to Britain. The British renamed it Fort Charlotte, after the queen. The Spanish took it in seventeen eighty and renamed it Fort Carlota. The Americans arrived in eighteen thirteen. Each flag brought a new name but the same thick walls. About one third of that original fort was reconstructed and reopened on July fourth, nineteen seventy-six, so the ground beneath it can still speak.