Fort D: Cape Girardeau's Last Civil War Fort

In eighteen sixty-one, Union forces built four earthen forts around Cape Girardeau to hold the Mississippi River bend and guard the road coming up from the south. Fort D guarded the southern approaches to the town. Of the four original forts, Fort D is the only one that survives.

Its embankments still rise from the ground on a quiet residential street, a rare intact Civil War earthwork in Missouri. The site was preserved through local effort and is now a city park, where the original gun platforms and perimeter walls give a tangible sense of how Union commanders thought about controlling river geography in the western theater.