This fort was built to protect New Orleans. 188 years later, it's surrendering to nature's forces. (2024)

Fort Livingston was built as a defensive bastion, its thick, shell-filled walls designed to absorb cannonballs instead of shattering before them.

The real threat to the fort, however, hasn’t been foreign armies or the scabrous pirates that occupied the Gulf-front Grand Terre Island before it. In its 188 years, the sprawling masonry outpost never witnessed active combat.

The real threat is, and has always been, nature.

Even while it was still under construction in the early 1840s, the men working on the fort were alarmed by the insistence of the Gulf waters eating away at the beachfront of Grand Terre. In the nearly two centuries since, that erosion — compounded by the increasingly devastating work of periodic hurricanes — has only continued.

Today, the crumbling Fort Livingston — named after former U.S. Sen. Edward Livingston, who also served as secretary of state under President Andrew Jackson — is recognized as a classic example of American military architecture of the era. It also boasts the distinction of being the only Louisiana fort located directly on the Gulf Coast.

At least, it is while it lasts.

A nest of pirates

Before Fort Livingston, Grand Terre Island was a verifiable pirate’s nest, abuzz with privateer Jean Lafitte and his legendary Baratarians, injuring both the reputation and the economy of Louisiana.

Clearly, the pirates, privateers and smugglers who had been using Grand Terre as a base of smuggling operations since at least 1805 had to go.

That’s what brought Commodore Daniel Tod Patterson, of the U.S. Navy, and Col. George Ross, of the 44th U.S. Infantry, to Grand Terre on Sept. 14, 1814, with an American military detachment in tow.

The raid took just a few hours, but sent Lafitte and his followers scrambling. Those scurvy scalawags who weren’t captured simply disappeared into the swamps and bayous.

That marked the end of the pirate presence on Grand Terre and the start of the American military presence.

The strategic value of Grand Terre had long been known to locals. Situated just across Barataria Pass from Grand Isle, it guarded access to Barataria Bay and Bayou Barataria, which in turn provided backdoor access to and from New Orleans.

That’s why the Spanish operated a watchtower there in the late 18th century, to protect New Orleans. It’s why Lafitte later set up shop there, as abase from which to smuggle goods into the city. And it’s why Barthelemy Lafon in 1813 drew up plans for a proposed battery to be located there.

Then came the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. It underscored the vulnerability of New Orleans — and thus control of the mouth of the Mississippi — to potential coastal invasion by foreign armies.

Determined to address such vulnerabilities sooner rather than later, President James Madison in 1815 championed the construction of a system of coastal forts along both the Gulf Coast and East Coast.

That system would include Fort Livingston.

The making of a fort

Officials drew up plans for a trapezoidal stronghold on the westernmost point of the island, on what is believed to be the spot of Lafitte’s operation.

In a novel idea intended to soften the blow of cannon fire, the fort’s walls were made of cemented shellwork that was in turn faced with brick and trimmed with granite. In an apparent effort to make use of local resources, the shells used in the walls were removed from local Indian mounds, as evidenced by the shards of native pottery embedded in them.

Two sets of exterior stairs rose from the inner court to the upper ramparts, where canon placements were located. Inside the walls were casemates — rooms with barrel-vaulted ceilings — intended to house soldiers, a magazine, a blacksmith shop, a carpentry shop, a bakery and the like.

A moat and drawbridge, along with earthwork fortifications, protected its northern, land-facing side.

Initial surveying and site work for the fort began around 1833, but construction wouldn’t begin in earnest until about 1840 when Capt. J.G. Barnard was put in charge of the project. (Among those assisting him: Lt. P.G.T. Beauregard, the future Confederate general.)

Work progressed slowly, due to dwindling appropriations — and thus dwindling building materials. The rapid erosion of the island’s beachfront was also a concern, with crews pausing construction on the fort for a time to build jetties to slow the water’s assault.

It didn’t work.

By the time the Civil War started in 1861, the fort still wasn’t completed. That didn’t stop a garrison of 300 Confederate soldiers and 15 canons from occupying it — although they vamoosed a year later, with the fall of New Orleans to Union troops.

Postwar plans

After the war, in a last-ditch effort to save the still-deteriorating outpost, and perhaps make a little money in the process, entrepreneur Joseph Hale Harvey — the namesake of the west bank community — came up with a so-crazy-it-just-might-work plan, petitioning the feds to let him transform the unused fort into a resort.

“The sea bathing at the fort is splendid, the fresh breezes from the gulf refreshing and exhilarating, and the oysters and fish the best in the world,” The Daily Picayune wrote in support of Harvey’s plan.

It never became reality. By February 1889, with erosion continuing its assault on the fort — including “a great portion of it having been washed away” by a recent storm, according to a Sept. 28, 1888, article in The Daily Picayune — the decision was made to abandon it.

A 1915 hurricane did still more damage, ripping away the south face of the structure. Subsequent storms did further damage.

In 1974, the fort was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Five years later, in 1979, the state Legislature declared it a State Commemorative Area. Meanwhile, nature continued doing its destructive work.

In more recent years, a rock jetty has been placed around the western tip of the island as an erosion barrier.

It has helped.

For now.

Sources: The Times-Picayune archive; National Register of Historic Places; “The Pirates Lafitte: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf,” by William C. Davis

Know of a New Orleans building worth profiling in this column, or just curious about one? Contact Mike Scott at moviegoermike@gmail.com.