Fort Macon. . .

We were so busy between going to Cape Lookout and the Ghost tour we did not get to go to the Maritime museum or Fort Macon.  We did do a quick trip to Fort Macon on our way home.  We did not get to go in the museum but we did go around the Fort and Big T took some fabulous pictures.  He has really gotten good at snapping shots with his camera.  He let me use it during the Pirate tour and on the beach but he took all the pictures at the Fort except those of him.  I snapped those.  We had been to Fort Fisher before when the boys were much younger but this Fort was very impressive.  I was amazed at the cannon placement all around the top portion of the Fort.  They had the cannons fixed so that they could easily rotate them almost 180 degrees.  They only had a couple out there for you to see but you could see where all the others had been.  The ones they had left were facing out to the harbor.  We walked all around the top of the Fort and then went down on the inside portion.  We saw their kitchen area and storage area they had samples of china pieces that they had found laying around the Fort.

My dear hubby is a history buff and especially war history.  I am glad too, I don't think they teach a lot of that in school anymore.  My kids will have to learn their history from their dad.  Hubby went into teaching mode while we were out there  spouting off all the things he knew about the Fort and the part it played in the war.  Here is a brief synopsis.

The Union forces actually built the Fort, the Confederates came and over took it at the start of  the war.  The Fort was later attacked and over taken by the Union in 1862.  402 North Carolina Confederates refused to surrender even though they were surrounded.  April 25, 1862 Union forces began a heavy siege for 11 hours.   It was a federal prison from 1867-1876 during the Spanish-American War.  On May 1, 1936 Fort Macon opened as North Carolinas' first functioning state park.

Ghost Tour of Wilkesboro. . .

We went on our first ghost tour.  Wilkesboro offers a ghost tour once a month starting in April.  It is a walking tour that lasts about an hour and a half.  Ours lasted almost two and a half hours, we had really good guides.  We learned a lot of local history from the Civil War era.  We got to see some historic spots in Wilkesboro and hear the local lore of who haunts what.  Our guides were very knowledgeable in the local history and Civil War history also.  We heard two stories of one hanging and how the great, great, great grandson of the hangee went into law because he said if his great, great, great grandfather had a good lawyer he might not have been hung.   He is a prominent attorney in the area today.  We saw the old jail that held Tom Dooley, yes the one the song is written about.  We were able to go in the slave quarters of an old home, the slaves had put a curse on the family that lived in the main house.  The curse was written on the wall of the slave quarters.  There were skeleton heads of a horse, a dog and some other small animals hanging from the ceiling.  Sprat swears the horse head was moving, we all said it was a draft, but the other heads were not moving.   Big T felt the cold spot where a little girl was run over by a carriage in the drive way of the main house that had the curse.   We got to see where the Tory Oak once stood.  The Tory Oak was where they hung British sympathizers.  The oak stood for more than 300 years but in 1989 Hugo took its toll.  There is another oak in its place, still young and not yet as grand.