Fort Morgan's story begins with a predecessor. After the Spanish departed Mobile in April 1813, the United States erected Fort Bowyer, an earth and wood redoubt on Mobile Point named for Colonel John Bowyer. In September 1814, Fort Bowyer repulsed a combined British naval and land attack. But the British returned in February 1815, fresh from their defeat at the Battle of New Orleans, and this time they took the fort. The American garrison surrendered. Before the British could press on toward Mobile, word arrived that the Treaty of Ghent had been signed on Christmas Eve 1814, ending the War of 1812. The British withdrew, and the United States recognized that Mobile Point needed something far more formidable than an earthen stockade. The result was Fort Morgan, a masonry pentagonal bastion fort named for Revolutionary War hero Daniel Morgan.

Eight days before Alabama officially seceded from the Union, Colonel John B. Todd led four companies of volunteers to capture Fort Morgan before dawn on January 3, 1861. The Confederates turned the fort into a linchpin of Mobile Bay's defense, mounting 18 of their heaviest guns -- including two 7-inch Brooke rifles and two British-made 8-inch Blakely rifles -- to command the main ship channel. The fort proved devastatingly effective as a blockade-running partner. Of the 17 vessels that ran out of the bay under its protective fire, every single one escaped capture. Of the 21 that tried to enter, 19 made it through. When Confederates spotted Union soldiers using the Sand Island Lighthouse to spy on the fort, they simply fired on the island and destroyed the lighthouse.

The morning of August 5, 1864, brought the battle that would define Fort Morgan forever. Admiral David G. Farragut led his Union fleet past the fort's guns and into Mobile Bay in one of the Civil War's most famous naval engagements. After the battle, U.S. Army forces under Major General Gordon Granger besieged Fort Morgan from the landward side. The fort's garrison held out until August 23, when Brigadier General Richard L. Page, his powder magazines threatened by fire in the citadel, ordered the white flag raised. Once back in Union hands, Fort Morgan served as a staging area for the battles of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakeley -- fought just days before Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Abandonment and decay followed the Civil War, but the Endicott Board under President Grover Cleveland revived the fort in the 1890s. Between 1895 and 1900, Fort Morgan received five modern concrete batteries equipped with fire control, electricity, and communications. Battery Bowyer, with its four 8-inch guns on disappearing carriages, saw operational duty during the Spanish-American War. Battery Dearborn held eight 12-inch coast defense mortars designed to rain shells down on enemy ships' lightly armored decks. In 1916, the Navy subjected an experimental battery near the fort to two full days of shelling from the battleships to test whether coastal defenses could survive naval bombardment. The battery held up with remarkably little damage. During both World Wars, the fort trained Coast Artillery Corps soldiers and, during World War II, hosted 155mm guns mounted on its ramparts and an adjacent airfield.

The Department of War turned Fort Morgan over to Alabama in 1946, and the Army walked away for good in 1947. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960, the fort today is maintained by the Alabama Historical Commission, its thick walls still bearing the scars of 19th-century bombardments. In 2007, the Civil War Preservation Trust listed it among the nation's ten most endangered battle sites. The following year, workers repairing cracks in the walls unearthed a 90-pound live Union naval shell -- a Parrott rifle round fired from a warship during the summer of 1864, still waiting in the masonry after 144 years. Fort Morgan sits at the very tip of the peninsula, with Dauphin Island and Fort Gaines across the channel, framing the entrance to Mobile Bay exactly as they did when Farragut steamed through.