NPS

The good, the bad, the ugly. Desired brick mortar (top),crumbling (mid), damaged(bottom)

In 2007, Fort Pulaski National Monument implemented a fee demonstration project that began to address the enormous preservation challenges that face a park with a 160 year old brick fort and associated historic structures. Partnering with an existing park maintenance staff of five and utilizing the STEP authority, a National Park Service program that allows for the hiring of student employees, the park hired six talented undergraduate and graduate students majoring in historic preservation from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) to form this first ever park preservation team.

The main focus of the team's work was to focus on reducing the amount of deferred maintenance within the walls of the fort, tuck-pointing deteriorated mortar joints, as well as maintaining the historic Cockspur Island Lighthouse.

Tuck-pointing and repairing old mortar joints remains one of the team's major focus inside Fort Pulaski. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) repaired crumbling mortar joints inside the fort using the latest technology, Portland cement, without knowing its damaging effects. However, Portland cement does not allow lime mortar to absorb and release moisture. Thus, the lime mortar is reduced to powder. The weakening mortar leads to cracking and flaking of historic bricks which threatens the overall integrity of the fort.

With more than 25 million bricks, today’s challenge for the preservation team involves removing the Portland cement and replacing it with the more traditional lime mortar and natural cements that would have been used during the construction of the fort. 

In April 2008, the team traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to participate in the "Preserving Coastal Forts: a National Park Service Workshop" hosted by Fort Sumter NM. On the first day of the workshop, participants visited Fort Moultrie, where demonstrations by masons from the Historic Preservation Training Center (HPTC) and the team from Fort Pulaski, offered the participants "hands-on" learning about historic mortars.

In just a little over a year, work by the preservation team has visibly improved the brick walls of Fort Pulaski and the Cockspur Island Lighthouse. When visiting the park take a look at the fort's southwest bastion to get a close-up view of the work being done.