Leslie and David's Wanderings: 7 March 2020 Fort Matanzas NM

Leslie took Etta to the groomer in the morning to get her cut for the warmer weather. Then we headed out to Fort Matanzas National Monument. David had visited this NM before with some of his SAE friends before one of their conferences. The Fort is really a heavily armed lookout post on the Matanzas River, built by the Spanish, from 1740 to 1742, to protect the rear entrance to St. Augustine. The fort was abandoned when Florida was transferred to the US in 1819. We read on the website a couple of weeks ago that the ferry from the visitor center the fort was shut down due to damage to the dock by Hurricane Dorian. But the ferry started back in service last week. So we were looking forward to a trip over to the Fort. When we got to the visitor center, we found out that they had canceled several ferry runs earlier in the day due to the strong winds. We went to the visitor center and collected our 72nd passport stamp, explored the very small store and watched the park movie. As the movie completed, the ranger came in and told us they would be running the 3:30 ferry since the winds had died down some during the day. We collected our FREE ferry ticket, got our safety briefing and boarded the boat. The five minute ride over was smooth compared to our last ferry ride! The Army Corp of Engineers rebuilt the fort in 1962. Prior to that it had been slowly disintegrating for 140 years from neglect. The fort was built from local coquina shell stone on top of a shallow sandbar that had been reinforced with pilings driven into the sand. The tower is 40 feet tall. The fort was normally manned by 6 soldiers and one officer but could hold 50 in times of war. The fort only saw action once, in 1742 when it drove off a British armada attempting to flank St. Augustine following a failed siege in 1740. The river and area around the fort was named after the Spanish word for “Slaughter”. In 1565, the French forces at Fort Caroline attacked the Spanish at St. Augustine but a hurricane drove their ships aground south of St. Augustine. The Spanish sent out soldiers and found 100-150 French trapped on the beach, after the French surrender, the Spanish slaughter all but 6. Two days later they repeated the slaughter with another group of French found at the same location. After touring the Fort and listening to the Rangers presentation on the history of the fort, we took the ferry back to the visitor center and headed back to the Wanderer.