Fort Point National Historic Site

This guide to Fort Point National Historic Site in San Francisco opens in the summer of 1865, as a Confederate warship named the Shenandoah steamed toward the bay with orders to shell it, its captain unaware the Civil War had already ended. It traces the fort's four years standing ready, its thick brick walls and tiers of cannon that never fired a shot in anger, and the news that turned the ship around. A second thread follows the fort's brush with demolition decades later, when Golden Gate Bridge engineers planned to clear it for their southern approach.