Fort Howell: Built by the Newly Free
Near Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
In the late summer of eighteen sixty four, United States Army engineers began constructing a fortification on the northern end of Hilton Head Island. Fort Howell, as it came to be called, was built by soldiers of the Thirty Second United States Colored Infantry and the One Hundred Forty Fourth New York Infantry, working under Army engineers. The fort was an earthen work, built of soil and timber in a roughly five-sided layout.
Its purpose was to protect Mitchelville, the nearby village of freed people, though it never saw combat. The First South Carolina Infantry, later redesignated the Thirty Third United States Colored Infantry, was one of the first Black regiments formally organized in the Union Army, and it operated out of the Hilton Head area. The men who enlisted had been enslaved on the plantations of Hilton Head and the surrounding islands.
Black soldiers of the Thirty Second United States Colored Infantry, many of them free-born men from Pennsylvania, would later build Fort Howell. The construction of Fort Howell by Black soldiers and formerly enslaved laborers is one of the significant stories of the South Carolina Sea Islands theater of the war. Fort Howell's earthworks are among the best preserved Civil War fortifications in South Carolina.
A walking trail at the site loops around the exterior walls, which still rise several feet from the ground, a tangible remnant of the months of labor that men who had been enslaved put into defending the world they were beginning to build.
