Fort Johnston

About this property

Fort Johnston was a British fort, later a United States Army post, in Brunswick County, North Carolina on Moore Street near Southport, North Carolina. It stands on the west bank of the Cape Fear River, four miles above its mouth. Prior to the construction of Fort Johnston, Early British settlements on the Carolina coast had very few fortifications, leaving them exposed to piracy and privateering. Spanish raiders in particular took advantage of this vulnerability. In 1744, as King George’s War began between Britain and France, Governor Gabriel Johnston appointed a committee to identify an appropriate site for a fort to defend the Cape Fear River. The governor of South Carolina agreed to supply ten small cannon for the work. With Spanish privateering growing more and more aggressive, the North Carolina General Assembly in April 1745 authorized construction of “Johnston’s Fort” near the river’s mouth, and in the spring of 1748 appropriated 2,000 pounds to start building. Two Spanish privateers in summer 1748 intended to seize enslaved persons working on construction of the fort. Finding none at the time of their raid, the privateers sailed upriver and attacked Brunswick, North Carolina by sea and land, looting the town and taking hostages over two days. The local militia eventually drove the raiders back to their ships, but the Spanish privateers continued to bombard the town for a third day. Only after one privateering ship accidentally exploded and sank did the fleet retreat toward the sea. Although Governor Johnston declared the fort complete in April 1749, work on the fortification, the first in North Carolina colony, continued to progress well into the 1750s. North Carolina garrisoned the fort with a few dozen militia soldiers and used it for coastal protection and as a quarantine station for incoming mariners. The militia men included Captain Robert Howe, first stationed at Fort Johnston in 1766. In 1766, armed colonists protesting the Stamp Act 1765 threatened Fort Johnston after British officials seized two merchant vessels. For nearly a decade afterward, the fort remained relatively quiet, serving as a defensive post for the lower Cape Fear River region. Rising tensions between the colonies and the Crown in the early 1770s, however, brought new assaults on the fort. American patriots attacked the home of Josiah Martin, British royal governor of the Province of North Carolina, at New Bern, on 24 May 1775. Governor Martin then sent his family to New York, transferred his headquarters to Fort Johnston on 2 June 1775, and instigated a plot to arm enslaved persons. After the patriots discovered this plot, John Ashe of the Wilmington Committee of Safety led a group of patriotic colonists in a plot against Fort Johnson in July 1775. Governor Martin and his supporters removed most military stores, dismounted the cannon of the fort, and fled aboard the British sloop-of-war Cruiser at anchor in the Cape Fear River. American patriots controlled, burnt, and destroyed Fort Johnston, including the home of its commandant. Governor Martin rallied Loyalist forces from his offshore redoubt.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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