The spring breeze was cool and swift as I strolled beneath live oaks draped with moss through a little military town along the banks of the Frederica River. It was a neighborhood like many urban and metro-suburban places, with square blocks and houses in rows and commercial sites intermingled with residences. Street signs identified “Cross Street” and “Broad Street,” where orange trees once provided shade, and it felt like an ideal hamlet for the off-the-grid, farm-to-table, permaculture kind of crowd, with its reports of abundant wildlife, peach trees, figs, and pomegranates.

But the community was not exactly as it seemed. It was one built of necessity. The village was on an island, situated inside a fort, and it was built to protect the burgeoning settlement against attack. The British controlled the territory. Spain was our enemy. The time was 1736, and I had slipped back into colonial days on the Georgia frontier upon my first step at Fort Frederica National Monument.

I was on a spring-break road trip from Virginia to Florida in March with my husband, Neil, who wanted to check a few more National Park Service sites off his list, collect more of the visitor brochures for his growing NPS library. I knew these types of lesser-known sites weren’t as glamorous as the big parks (in 2024, 28 percent of NPS visits took place at 'national parks,' while only 3 percent were at national historic sites, 6 percent at national monuments, and 9 percent at national historical parks). But we were NPS groupies and history nerds, with the lead-up to the nation’s 250^th birthday on our minds, and on previous trips, we’d enjoyed Fort Sumter in Charleston, Fort Pulaski in Savannah, Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, and Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, and I knew that NPS sites always offered some unexpected delight.

Fort Frederica was my favorite kind of place—a ghost town. Once a community with “avenues of water oaks in mossy festoons, and in spring time redolent in jassamines [sic]” with glimpses of “spacious verandas,” “splendid parade grounds,” and “the beautiful waters of the Altamaha,” none of the buildings from the town’s short life (1736 to 1748) remained. Where the botanist William Bartram once said, “Its natural beauty surpassed any place I have ever visited,” we meandered from oyster-shell foundation to oyster-shell foundation (a concrete known as tabby) through the lost community of a thousand residents and their once-grand brick homes—what NPS describes as “a thoroughly English town” of “substantial houses in the Georgian style.”

Walls of magazine ruins/Sue Eisenfeld

With one crenellated tabby wall remaining of the magazine at the water’s edge, and ruins of barracks that slept hundreds of soldiers nearby, we could see in our minds eye the former blacksmith’s shop and apothecary and home site of the breadmaker and the candlemaker, and we walked the mounds and divots in the earth that were traces of the town wall and moat.

The town and fort were built on St. Simons Island at the behest of General James Edward Oglethorpe. According to NPS, in its first decade under Oglethorpe’s founding and governorship of the Georgia colony, it “welcomed immigrants of diverse religious views and national origins, banned slavery and rum, and successfully resisted Spanish attack.”

Like a military base closing today, people moved away after the fort served its purpose in repelling the Spanish. When the new Georgia governor, Captain John Reynolds, visited in 1754/55, he described the town as “decayed” and “in ruins.” It may have been used briefly during the Revolution, when the British re-took it from the American colonists and then destroyed it. And by 1913, a report described it as “houses without inhabitants, barracks without soldiers, guns without carriages, and streets overgrown with weeds.” Nearly 200 years passed, including at least 50 years of citizen activism, before the U.S. government preserved the site as a national monument, uncovered its story through archaeology, and rehabilitated it into the surprisingly transformative site it is today.

Fort Sumter And Fort Moultrie National Historic Site

Frederica was the second fort on our trip; the first had been Fort Moultrie, the neglected stepsister of Fort Sumter with only 16 percent of the total visitors to Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park. On a cold, rainy day when boat rides were suspended to Sumter due to weather, we drove to Sullivan’s Island.

Neil and I had both read Eric Larson’s book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. We had both marveled at the various maneuvers Major Robert Anderson undertook to try to hold Fort Sumter for the Union, one of which was a stealth reconfiguring of supplies out of the vulnerable Fort Moultrie and into the less-vulnerable Fort Sumter. We wanted to walk the grounds where this had happened in the cover of night.

What we didn’t realize until we got there is that the Civil War wasn’t Fort Moultrie’s first rodeo. That had happened in June 1776 when the British attacked it. The fort's colonials helped repel them, and Charleston was saved. The British tried again in 1780 and succeeded, but then Americans won the war. Over the next couple of centuries, the fort moldered away and was rebuilt and modernized several times and continued its service through both world wars.

British ships fire on Fort Moultrie during 1776 Battle of Sullivan's Island/NPS

Aboveground, the fort felt very Civil War, with the miasma of the Great Unpleasantness still hovering over Charleston Harbor. But underground, after descending a few sets of steep stairs and pushing through latched metal doors to a bunker, the fort felt very 1940s. We wended our way through sterile yellow hallways past the duty officers’ operations center with maps and period posters, a radio control room and message center, a locked air conditioning and chemical warfare system room, and an airlock for a chemical gas attack.

Time-traveling back into the geological layers of history felt like walking through a World War II Hollywood set, where the National Park Service became the director and producer in 1960.

On the way off the island, a historic sign near a small grassy field caught my eye. Maybe because I’m a sucker for historic cemeteries, the shape of the land moved me to investigate.

“In this cemetery are the remains of some of Sullivan's Island's original Islanders, people of predominantly African American descent…Buried here are Carpenters, Cooks, Oystermen, Laundresses, Nursemaids, House Keepers, Midwives, Soldiers, and Seamen,” a historical marker read. “Many helped…construct the palmetto log fort during the Revolutionary War, which later became Fort Moultrie.”

It was one layer of the history I hadn’t passed through at the fort, but the Sullivan's Island Historic Cemetery Association—supported in part by NPS—filled in the blanks.

Charles Pinckney National Historic Site

The other destination in our off-the-beaten-path, early-days-in-our-nation’s-history national park tour was Charles Pinckney National Historic Site in South Carolina. Just another white enslaver, I had thought to myself on the way there, as Neil pressed on, driving through a downpour. But I shouldn’t have doubted. Yes, Charles Pinckney was an enslaver, and he was a Revolutionary, too—a lieutenant who helped keep British hands off of Savannah, was captured and imprisoned by the British from 1780 to 1781, was elected to the South Carolina general assembly, became a delegate to Congress representing South Carolina at the Constitutional Convention, served as South Carolina governor four times and U.S. Senator, and became ambassador to Spain. In fact, our Constitution includes nearly 30 provisions that were part of “Pinckney’s Draft,” including not requiring religious testing as a qualification for running for office and dividing the legislature into the House and Senate.

The cottage—not the original plantation house Pinckney inherited from his father, his childhood summer home where he later invited George Washington for breakfast—was closed. Water was still dropping from the live oaks, but we decided to stretch our legs by taking a narrow path through the grass of the 28-acre remnant of the former 715-acre rice and indigo plantation known as Snee Farm. Again I was pulled through the field by some unknown force until I came to a square in the dirt outlined in stone. It was a relic of one of the living quarters for the enslaved population, as Pinckney had enslaved 46 individuals, carpenters, barrel makers, gardeners, shoemakers, and other specialists.

The house at Snee Farm, Charles Pinckney National Historic Site/NPS

If developers had had their way, they would have taken every last acre of this historic site. Instead, what was left was listed in the National Register of Historic Places and designated as a national historic landmark in 1973, and a citizen group that recognized its significance in history purchased this core parcel away from a developer in 1988 and sold it to NPS.

Some TripAdvisor reviews claim there’s “nothing to see” at Pinckney, deemed the place “not a high value visit” and “not really worth the time,” but we came away having learned at least three things: First, the Lowcountry region employed the “task” system of work for the enslaved, rather than the dawn-to-dusk “gang” system used elsewhere—meaning each enslaved person was responsible for a certain acreage of work per day, and when they finished, their time was their own.

Second, enslavers specifically sought West Africans as their labor force because of their knowledge of rice farming. Of note, they brought with them knowledge of a technology called a rice trunk, and there was one on display at this site. The device, which made large-scale rice farming possible, is essentially a sluice that can drain or flood a rice field, a wooden box built underneath a berm with water control structures on each side that can be raised or lowered to let water in or out.

Finally, it was here that we learned for the first time about the labor-intensive process of indigo cultivation, which had its beginnings in South Carolina. Charles Pinckney’s educated wife Eliza was a pioneering botanist and planter who figured out how to grow it in America, oversee enslaved people to produce enough for dye production, and begin trade with Great Britian. By the start of the Revolution, this “blue gold” made up one-third of all exports from South Carolina; in 2008, she was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame for her efforts.

We didn’t see a single ranger at any of these sites. The bathrooms were closed at one of them, and the visitor center was closed at two. It was midweek during school vacation time, and yet all three sites felt a bit deserted, perhaps due to the new budget cuts and staff reductions-of-force at NPS. But a few people milled around, collecting their NPS brochures, driving away with another notch for the niche American history they learned, another road less traveled that they decided to take.