Battery Buchanan
Fort Fisher’s Last Stand
These are the remnants of Battery Buchanan, named for Confederate Adm. Franklin Buchanan. It was constructed in 1864 to guard this point and also to serve as “a citadel to which an overpowered garrison might retreat.” It was the last major earthwork erected to support Fort Fisher, the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” located a mile northeast.
On Christmas Day 1864, during the first of two battles for Fort Fisher, the Confederate sailors and marines manning the four-gun battery here repulsed Federal boats dragging New Inlet for torpedoes (mines), sinking one vessel. During the second battle, on January 15, 1865, Confederate commanders Gen. W.H.C. Whiting and Col. William Lamb fell wounded. When it became clear that the fort must be surrendered, Lamb later wrote, the two men were “hurriedly removed on stretchers to Battery Buchanan where [Maj. James Reilly] proposed to make a stand ... but we found the guns spiked and every means of transportation, even the barge and crew of the colonel commanding, taken by Capt. R.T. Chapman of our navy, who ... had abandoned us to our fate.” Soon the Federal force, led by the 27th U.S. Colored Troops, threatened to overrun Battery Buchanan.
Reilly surrendered both the battery and Fort Fisher here, waving a handkerchief tied to his sword. Capt. E. Lewis Moore, 7th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, accepted the surrender and the sword. Years later, in 1893, Moore generously returned the sword to Reilly, and it is displayed in the Fort Fisher Museum.
Marker can be reached from Fort Fisher Boulevard South (U.S. 421) 1.4 miles south of Loggerhead Road.
Courtesy hmdb.org
