Fort George

Reconstruction of Fort George

Fort George was a British fort at Pensacola, built in 1778 on Gage Hill. It was heavily damaged in 1781's Battle of Pensacola, and eventually abandoned, but a portion of the fort was reconstructed, and the site is maintained as a park by the City of Pensacola.

The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 8, 1974.

Construction

Richard Campbell, in his Historical Sketches of Colonial Florida, describes the layout and build of Fort George:

	Fort George was a quadrangle with bastions at each comer. There were within the fort a powder magazine and barracks for the garrison, besides the chamber above mentioned. The woods north of it, for an eighth of a mile, and within a curve bending around it to the bay, were felled, in order to give play to its guns landward, whilst they could bear, upon an enemy in the bay by firing over the town. By a system of signals, intercommunication was kept up with Tartar Point and thence with Red Cliffs.
—Richard Campbell, Historical Sketches of Colonial Florida.

Battle of Pensacola

On March 9, 1781, Bernardo de Gálvez began an amphibious siege of the British forces at Pensacola. The siege culminated on May 8, when Spanish artillery fire caused the British powder magazine to explode. Spanish forces overran the remaining British contingent at Fort George and took Pensacola.

After taking Pensacola, the Spanish renamed the fort as Fort San Miguel.

Reconstruction

In 1981, on the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Pensacola, a bust of Bernardo de Gálvez, a gift from the Spanish government, was dedicated at the Fort George site.

Other images

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  The ruins of Fort George atop Gage Hill circa 1870s