Fort Zachary Taylor: Key West Civil War Fort and Its Hidden Beach

At the very end of the road, where the island of Key West runs out into impossibly clear blue water, sits a quiet beach guarded by a brick fortress with a remarkable past. This is a short narrated visit to Fort Zachary Taylor: the Civil War fort that never fell, its lost cannons, and the hidden beach that locals call the best in Key West.

Filmed September 2024.

ABOUT THIS PLACE
Fort Zachary Taylor stands at the southern tip of Key West, Florida, the southernmost point of the continental United States. Construction of the three story brick fort began in 1845 as part of a chain of coastal defenses, and it was named in 1850 for Zachary Taylor, the general and president who died in office that year. Yellow fever and material shortages delayed the work until 1866. When Florida seceded in 1861, Union soldiers occupied the unfinished fort and held it throughout the Civil War; it served as headquarters of the U.S. Navy's East Gulf Blockading Squadron, and its huge Rodman and Columbiad cannons, with a range of three miles, deterred any Confederate attack. When the fort was later modernized, the Civil War guns were buried inside the new walls as fill and forgotten, until volunteers led by Howard England began excavating them in 1968, uncovering the largest collection of Civil War cannons in the United States. Today it is Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park, famous for its beach and for some of the clearest snorkeling water in the Florida Keys, beside the only living coral barrier reef in the continental U.S.

CHAPTERS
0:00 The End of the Road
0:44 The Southern Edge
1:16 The Fortress, 1845
1:52 Twenty One Years
2:26 A Union Fort
3:00 The Blockade
3:34 Buried and Found
4:11 The Jetty
4:42 The Clearest Water
5:15 The Beach
5:44 Keep Exploring

CREDITS
Music: "Earth Prelude" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).
Narration is AI generated. Historical details verified against public sources.

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