although long disused, the forts that guarded Portsmouth Harbor still have tales to tell

The quartet of forts that protected Portsmouth’s harbor between the 17th and 20th centuries—Fort Foster, Fort McLary, Fort Constitution and Fort Stark—are serene now. The guns have all been removed and trees and grass grow over giant concrete structures where young soldiers once kept a vigilant eye on the coast.

Yet the strongholds still vibrate with reminders of a time when homeland defense was a tangible activity, when there was the possibility, albeit a small one, of marauding enemies attacking Portsmouth by way of the sea.

You can learn about the forts from volunteer guides at Fort Foster and Fort McClary during the summer months, but neither Fort Constitution nor Fort Stark have guided tours. Two of the best sources for information about the forts are on the Internet. Local historian J. Dennis Robinson’s Web site, www.seacoastnh.com, chronicles many of the exploits at the forts throughout history. Even more comprehensive is www.portsmouthforts.com, a site run by Peter Payette.

Payette was born in Portsmouth and his father worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. About 10 years ago, he started researching naval history, but found information on Portsmouth’s harbor defenses to be lacking.

”I took it upon myself to do it myself,” he says.

Payette’s site covers the evolution of the forts from colonial encampments in the 1600s to full-fledged military operations in the 1940s, when German U-boats were in the Gulf of Maine. The activities at the forts themselves were fairly mundane, however.

“For most of their history, they were just sitting there, not doing anything,” Payette says. “They really didn’t become full time ... until right before World War II.”

But even that period of high activity was short lived and uneventful, and the forts wilted during the post-war years. “The need for coastal artillery was pretty much obsolete,” Payette says. “Everything went to missile defense, but Portsmouth wasn’t important enough for missile defense.”

Some of the forts were used during training exercises for the Coast Guard and Navy, but by the 1970s and ’80s, all were turned over to their respective states. New Hampshire owns Fort Constitution and Fort Stark, while Maine owns Fort McClary and Fort Foster.

Fort Constitution
The site of one of the first acts of revolution in America, Fort Constitution in New Castle was originally built in 1631 and known as the Castle. It had four cannons with which to defend the harbor. The fort was renamed Fort William and Mary in 1692, after the British rulers of the era, and remained under British control until December 1774, when 400 members of the local Sons of Liberty chapter overcame the six British soldiers stationed there to seize control of the fort and confiscate the cannons and gunpowder.

Some accounts, including local historian Charles Brewster’s tale of the raid written in the mid-1800s, state that the gunpowder found its way to the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. You can read Brewster’s account online at www.seacoastnh.com/brewster/112.html, or see it reenacted in August during Pontine Theatre’s production of “Brewster’s Rambles About Portsmouth.”

The fort became known as Fort Constitution in the early 1800s and remained active through World War II. Now surrounded by the local Coast Guard station, there’s no tour guide on hand, and, aside from a beautiful view of the harbor, little to look at—a small hallway carved out of the wall of the fort promises some sort of interesting adventure, but then terminates with a sign that says “No public access.” A few scattered information posts provide some details of the fort’s history, but it seems as though the site of the prelude to the American Revolution should be a bigger deal. The Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse sits off to the side of the fort. The Friends of the Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse will host tours on June 25, July 30, Aug. 27 and Sept. 24, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. You can find out more at www.lighthouse.cc/portsmouth.

Fort Foster
Fort Foster in Kittery is the most polished, public-park like of all the forts. A long, tree-lined country lane leads to the estate-like remnants of the fort, thrust out on a remote point of land on the Maine side of the river. Two of the gun batteries, Battery Chapin and Battery Bohlen, are still standing—large, drab concrete structures sporting stairs and ladders that, decades ago, led to the guns that defended the harbor. You can still see the faint outlines of the pedestals on which the guns stood. The remaining mine casemate, from which the harbor’s mine defenses were controlled in World War I, emerges naturally from the side of a hill, looking like a sort of industrial hobbit den. Atop the hill are now-sealed ventilation shafts for the casemate. The Battery Commander’s station towers above the rest of the fort. There are picnic tables and tiny grills scattered about, and there’s even a playground, making the overall feel more recreational than historical.

Fort McClary
If evaluated in cinematic terms, Fort McClary in Kittery’s Pepperell Cove wouldn’t be out of place in a flashback scene in a “Highlander” movie. To get to the fort proper, you’ve got to walk up a steep-ish hill. From this vantage point, you get a sweeping view of the harbor. Looking seaward, you can see Forts Foster and Constitution at the mouth of the river, as well as the Whaleback Light, just beyond. Near at hand, the hexagonal blockhouse, which once housed soldiers, and the giant stone north bastion, which juts sharply out of the hill and points toward the road like an accusatory finger, give Fort McClary the feel of a forgotten medieval European stronghold. Yet Fort McClary has been the least active of the local forts.

Local merchant William Pepperrell acquired the land in 1689; however, it wasn’t until 1715 that a permanent fort was erected here. The New Hampshire militia occupied the property during the Revolution, then all was quiet throughout much of the 1800s, except for construction of the blockhouse in 1844 and during the Civil War, when fears of Confederate raids spurred a massive refortification project. However, work here was suspended in 1868. During World War I and World War II, McClary served as a lookout post for civil defense units. The fort was officially deactivated in 1918, and in 1969 was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Fort Stark
If Fort McClary looks like the setting for a sword–and-sorcery epic, then Fort Stark looks like it could be the location for a New England-inspired remake of “Hostel.” Even in bright daylight, it’s a pretty spooky place, although historically, nothing remotely spooky happened here.

Fort Stark served as a fortified point throughout the Revolution and the early 1800s, but it wasn’t until 1874 that much of today’s fort was constructed. Stark saw most of its action during World War II, when, according to Payette’s Web site, the Battery Kirk building was converted into the Harbor Entrance Control Post, the command center for harbor defense. After WWII, a Naval Reserve unit intermittently used Fort Stark as a drilling station until 1983, when it became a state park.

But Fort Stark is only a state park in the loosest sense of the term. There are no picnic tables or restrooms—in fact, the portable toilet set aside for visitors was found flipped over during a recent visit. A lonely door on one of the gun batteries hangs on by one hinge. There’s graffiti on most of the buildings, from messages of encouragement (“Let the coast see your smile” is emblazoned on the top of Battery Kirk) to the logo of the cinematically-inspired rap group Wu-Tang Clan. Some enterprising soul has spray-painted the symbol used in “The Blair Witch Project,” a sort of crucifix with a pair of crossed sticks on the bottom, all throughout Fort Stark.

Interior access to the gun batteries was closed in 2002, but there are still ways to get inside the shrouded corridors, and though the actual park grounds are relatively litter-free, there’s plenty of clutter inside some of these hidey-holes, suggesting that some continue to make Fort Stark a home, or, at the very least, a nightly hangout. Unless you’re adventurous, you’ll probably not want to go in. Fort Stark, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, is bat country.

forts on the Web
For visitor information about each of the forts, visit these sites.
Fort Foster: www.kittery.org/TownServices/fortFosterRulesandRegulations.htm
Fort Constitution: www.nhparks.state.nh.us/ParksPages/FortConstitution/FortConstitution.html
Fort Stark: www.nhstateparks.org/ParksPages/FortStark/FortStark.html
Fort McClary: www.state.me.us/cgi-bin/doc/parks/find_one_name.pl?park_id=38

life at the forts

Between 1991 and 1998, Lester Stevens acted as a sort of park ranger/tour guide for Fort Stark. He’d keep the place tidy, answer questions and generally let people use the park as they pleased. Stevens, 85, now lives in Rye in a cozy house with a excitable dog named Max. But during World War II, he was stationed at Fort Constitution with the Army. He enlisted in February 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, and worked with the Submarine Mine Battery, which laid out the underwater mines that served as one component of the Portsmouth Harbor’s defense during the war.

Stevens recalls that after the fall of France in June 1940, the Army beefed up defense at all the forts along the East Coast, from Maine to Florida. Such was the case in Portsmouth and Kittery, where Forts Stark, Constitution, McClary and Foster made up the Harbor Defense Force, along with the more southerly Fort Dearborne in Rye (created during WWII on residential property, now Odiorne Point State Park). The forts were equipped with anti-aircraft guns and searchlights as well as large cannon-like guns that had a firing range of more than 10 miles. The harbor was festooned with both underwater and floating mines, and a submarine net stretched between Fort Stark and Fort Foster.

The primary reason for defense measures in the harbor was the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. “If it had not been for the shipyard, (the soldiers stationed at the forts) wouldn’t have been here anyway,” Stevens says. The scene was quieter than most soldiers had ben prepared for. Stevens asked to be transferred for overseas duty six times in 1942.

Though the forts didn’t see any combat action—it turned out that the guns were only fired for test purposes—there were a small number of civilian casualties. In January, 1942, the mine planter General Richard Arnold sank during a storm and 10 civilians were lost. Later during the war, a plane towing a target for the anti-aircraft guns at the forts went down in the harbor after the pilot was blinded by a searchlight.

Stevens was on one of the two boats sent out to drag the harbor for the wreckage. They spent two days searching, but couldn’t find anything. Shortly afterward, the Coast Guard found the plane about a mile away from where Stevens and the rest had been searching. Stevens remembers being frustrated with not finding the plane.

“That plane was towing for our needs, and we wanted to recover (it) more than anything in the world.”
Stevens met his wife in 1942 and married her the following year. He left the Army in 1945, but stayed in the area. Later, he started to research the history of the forts and the harbor’s defenses during WWII.

“Once I retired, I checked stuff out, read the history books,” he says. “When you’re in the service, you don’t give a damn, it’s just a day-to-day thing.”

Stevens enjoyed working as a tour guide at Fort Stark in the 1990s. What he didn’t enjoy was the upper management of the Parks and Recreation Department at the time, especially their insistence that he charge visitors admission to the park. Stevens says he didn’t want to charge admission because Fort Stark, and the other forts in the harbor, are an important history lesson. He stopped working at Fort Stark in 1998, but he still volunteers occasionally at Odiorne Point State Park.

“When you’re doing something that you like, it isn’t work,” he says.