Battery Spencer

This guide to Battery Spencer in San Francisco tells of the coastal gun battery the Army finished in 1897 above the Golden Gate, named for Revolutionary War general Joseph Spencer, and built to fire on any warship that entered the bay. Soldiers stood watch here through two world wars for an enemy fleet that never came. One gun shipped off to Europe in 1917, and by 1942 the Army judged the rest obsolete, cutting them up for scrap. The empty gun pits remain in the bluff, mossy concrete circles where steel once turned.