Fort Carroll: Secure Bird Sanctuary?

 

In the mid-nineteenth century, Baltimore’s ports needed increased protection along the Patapsco River for the routes between Baltimore and Chesapeake Bay. By 1848, the United States War Department had the green light to begin construction on a hexagonal structure designed by Robert E. Lee.

The fort would be named for Declaration of Independence-signer Charles Carroll in 1850, and saw use in the Civil War despite not yet being fully completed.  The structure was planned to have four levels, the first of which cost one million dollars to complete.

Abandoned Industrial Icon: Armour Meat Packing Plant

 

The Armour & Company meat packing plant in National City, Illinois is a window into a bygone era, a time capsule with late-19th century technology still on display. During its heyday the busy stock yards of East St. Louis were the largest in the world, and known around the U.S. as the “Hog Capital of the Nation.”

Advances in technology and labor disputes ultimately drove the meat packers out of National City. The obsolete Armour plant had become expensive to operate and was eventually shut down by the company in 1959.

Unused since Armour & Co. left nearly 55 years ago, the 110 year-old structure still sits in East St. Louis today.

The Forgotten Castle on the Hudson

 

On a lonely island fifty miles north of New York City, the bricks of a once-proud castle slowly return to the earth. The crumbling fortress is one of several remaining structures on tiny Pollepel Island, an abandoned six-and-a-half acre crag hugging the east bank of the Hudson River.

The 100 year-old Bannerman’s Castle was originally built as an arsenal, and has been abandoned for the last forty five years since a fire ravaged the island in the summer of 1969. It was the creation of a nineteenth-century businessman and served as an advertisement for the era’s largest military surplus empire.

When the castle’s namesake passed away, the island was forgotten. It’s brief resurrection was cut short by a fatal fire. For half a century the building has been losing battles against nature. Absent intervention in the very near future, it may lose the war.