Fort Pickens

At Fort Pickens, visitors and rangers today describe a persistent sense of being watched in certain rooms of the fort. Completed in 1834 to guard the entrance to Pensacola Bay, Fort Pickens was one of the few Southern forts to remain in Union hands throughout the Civil War. Its best-documented later chapter: on October 25, 1886, the Army brought Apache leader Geronimo and fifteen fellow warriors here as prisoners of war, holding the men separately from their families, who were sent to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, until the two groups were reunited at Fort Pickens in May 1887. The prisoners worked seven-hour days clearing the grounds and were, by early 1887, enough of a curiosity that tourists rode the ferry out from Pensacola just to see them, before all were transferred to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama in May 1888.