Looking Out from White Point Garden

George N. Barnard made this view from the second-floor piazza of Louis D. DeSaussure's house, at the corner of South Battery and East Battery, looking inland along the street. The ironwork in the foreground is what remained of the 12.75-inch Blakely rifle at Battery Ramsay, the work the Charlestonians called the White Point Battery. Barnard had been photographing for the Union army since 1863, had followed Sherman's army through Georgia, and came to Charleston in March 1865 to record what the war had left.

The gun had been the heaviest piece in the city's defenses. Blakely rifles were English, built to the patent of Captain Alexander Theophilus Blakely of the Royal Artillery, and the two 12.75-inch guns brought through the blockade to Charleston in 1863 were the largest rifled cannon the Confederacy ever put into service. The Confederates had no foundry capable of anything like them; heavy rifles of that caliber had to be bought abroad and run past the blockading squadron.

The garrison destroyed the gun on the night of February 17, 1865, as the city was being given up. The method was crude and effective: several powder charges rammed down the bore, the muzzle plugged, and the whole thing fired. The breech was thrown sixteen yards to the rear. A fragment of about five hundred pounds went through the roof of a house three lots away — the William Roper house at what was then 5 East Battery, owned by William Ravenel and lived in during the war by his nephew Alfred F. Ravenel. The address today is 9 East Battery, and the iron is still in the attic.

Inside the earthen parapet, topped with gabions that were never filled, is the rest of the gun. The gabions are the giveaway that the work was still being improved when it was abandoned: they are wicker cylinders, set in place empty, waiting for the dirt that would have made them proof against shot.