Fort McHenry

Listen first. Wind comes off the water and moves through the grass on the earthen walls. A halyard knocks against a tall flagpole. Gulls call over the harbour. Underfoot, the path leads toward low brick walls set into grass-covered ramparts. From above, this fort makes the shape of a five-pointed star. From the ground, it feels small and quiet. That quiet is part of the story. On one September night, this was one of the loudest places in North America.

You are standing on Whetstone Point, a finger of land where the Patapsco River opens toward the Chesapeake Bay. Behind you lies the city of Baltimore. Ahead lies the route any enemy ship would need to take to reach its harbour. Defenders saw the value of this spot during the American Revolution, when a simpler earthwork stood here. The star fort you see now went up in the late eighteenth century, as the young United States worried about attack from the sea.

The fort carries the name of James McHenry. He was a Baltimore man who served as Secretary of War under George Washington. The star design was a common European idea of the time. Each pointed bastion, or projecting corner, let soldiers fire along the face of the next wall. No attacker could approach without coming under fire from two directions. Walk the top of the ramparts and you can see how every angle covers another.

Now to the night that made this place famous. In 1814, Britain and the United States were at war. That August, British troops had burned public buildings in Washington, including the Capitol and the President's house. Baltimore expected to be next. The city was a busy port, and its fast privateer ships had raided British merchant vessels for two years. Many in Britain saw Baltimore as a nest of pirates. They wanted it punished.

On September 13, 1814, British warships moved up the river and began to bombard this fort. The attack went on through the day and through a rainy night — around twenty-five hours in all. Special bomb vessels fired heavy explosive shells high into the air. Rockets streaked across the dark sky and left trails of fire. Inside the walls, roughly a thousand defenders waited under the commander, Major George Armistead. Many British guns fired from beyond the reach of the fort's own cannon.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. During the bombardment, a British shell crashed into the fort's powder magazine, where the gunpowder was stored. By the accounts that survive, it did not explode. Had it gone off, the story of this place, and perhaps of the war, could have ended very differently. As you walk the grounds, look for the magazine. Its thick walls make the near miss feel very real.

Several kilometres downriver, a lawyer named Francis Scott Key watched the attack. He had gone out to the British fleet to arrange the release of an American prisoner, a doctor. The British let them go, but held them on a ship until the battle ended. So Key spent that long night watching the glow of rockets and the bursting of shells over this fort. He could not know whether it still stood.

At dawn on September 14, the guns fell silent. Through the morning haze, Key saw a huge American flag rise over the fort. Baltimore had held. The British gave up the attack and sailed away. Moved by the sight, Key began to write a poem. It was soon printed and set to an existing popular tune. The poem became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner." More than a century later, in 1931, Congress made it the national anthem.

That flag has its own story. Major Armistead had wanted a flag so large that the British would see it from far away. A Baltimore flag maker, Mary Pickersgill, sewed it with the help of family members and helpers in her household. It measured about thirty by forty-two feet. It carried fifteen stars and fifteen stripes, because two new states had joined the original thirteen. The original survives today, carefully preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington.

The fort did not fall silent after 1814. During the Civil War, Maryland was a divided state, and the Union army used this fort as a prison. Confederate soldiers and civilians suspected of disloyalty were held here. One prisoner was Francis Key Howard, a Baltimore newspaper editor. He was the grandson of Francis Scott Key. He was locked up in the very fort his grandfather had made famous. He wrote later about that bitter irony.

Another chapter surprises most visitors. During the First World War, this ground became a large army hospital. Rows of wooden buildings spread across the site. Doctors here treated wounded soldiers returning from France. They also worked on new ways to help men recover from serious injuries, including early reconstructive surgery. Almost all of those hospital buildings are gone now. The open lawns around you cover the place where many of them once stood.

In 1939, Fort McHenry received a rare title. It became a national monument and historic shrine — the only site in the United States park system with that double designation. Inside the walls, you can step into restored brick buildings. There are barracks where soldiers slept, officers' quarters, and storage rooms. Notice the low doorways, the plain wooden floors, and the small windows. Life here was crowded, practical, and often cold when wind came off the water.

Before you leave, look up at the flag above the fort. A large replica with fifteen stars and fifteen stripes often flies here, a copy of the one Key saw at dawn. Then walk to the edge of the grounds and look out across the water. Container ships and tugboats move where British warships once fired. Listen again to the wind, the gulls, the halyard against the pole. The river looks calm now. Two hundred years ago, on a wet September morning, a whole city waited for that same flag to appear.