conference coverage when visiting our website. there, you can find our tv schedule and view all of our programs in their entirety. and it share with us your thoughts on our programming. to do that, connect with us on twitter and facebook. this is american history tv, only on c-span3. >> today, we are in casco bay, one mile off the shore of portland maine and we are on hog island ledge, where they built the fort in 1858 to help defend the border. in 1865 andeted built with two other forts off to the south here.

they resigned to work in conjunction with each other to defend the harbor. is aone thinks fort gorges civil war fort when it was funded long before the civil war . it was actually approved by congress and funded as a response to the war of 1812 which occurred much earlier. made,orges is a hand granite fort. if you looked at it from a top view looking down, you would see a gigantic d. what must people to realize is fort gorges is open in the middle. it has this wonderful parade grounds and there are people that of growing up their entire lives were never been here and think it is solid. the fort was named after sir fe gorges, the proprietor for the state of maine. i'm told he never set foot here. was modeleddesign

after the forts being built at that time, fort sumter, the difference being sumter was built out of bricks and this is gigantic blocks of granite. to think they came in here on a unloaded that and stuff, moved it around, then directed this structure by hand, it is amazing. hold 36ls designed to guns, one port were troops could come and go and originally it had one massive gate and a secondary gate. if you were standing in the parade ground looking back at the port, you would see the rooms to the north were officers quarters and the rooms to the south were more utility rooms. the vegetation that you see was never designed to be here. the jirga was put here to absorb the cannon fire and year after year, seedlings, birds, grass

began to sprout and if you see photos from as recently as 50 years ago, there is just grass here. we five years ago bushes and today, we have a 15 foot maple tree behind me. here we are on the second floor in the casemate on the east southeast side and if you look up, you will see the transfer cracks that we are finding in this area. they only exist in this one area of the fort. this is partially because of the dirt up top and the lack of drainage and heavily after 150 years, some settling in the inner and outer walls. these floor, you can see outlines of where a metal track would have been mounted to these studs that still remain. on the track, the rear end of a

large cannon carriage would have rolled and appear by the window, you can see an opening where the front of this carriage, a big tongue would stick into his groove and up in new window, you can still see the whole or a big pain would drop in and that your miscarriage would allow the cannon to swing back and forth and cover quite a broad range. the opening where the cannon ball blew through, these windows remain shut at all times. there were big iron shutters with big springs on them and the force of the cannonball would open the shutters than they would immediately slam shut. over here, you will see a flue. thatu can imagine, all black powder, the amount of smoke it would generate, each of

these casemate's has its own flue so that the smoke would exhaust. up here, you will see brackets where we suspect the soldiers stood on the cannon carriage and hung their tools. the soldiers also lived here. in the casemate with their cannons. we are in one of the antechamber's to the great magazine so we are one room away and you see these massive floor timbers that burned out decades ago. given the size of this room, it is not very big, maybe 10 by 16 feet, i have always wondered what could have been so heavy that they needed floor joints that massive. then it came to me one day, gunpowder, cannibals. -- cannon balls.

way, you willis be able to see where they kept the gunpowder. this is the great magazine. is a large room. it used to be two stories, the floor was removed at some point somehow. either burned out or it was taken out. this is a large room with the earliest use of concrete i have ever seen. slat where the old the individual boards were made. blocks -- giant granite blocks with mortar to take up the space. slotsoom does have some in the wall so that some air can circulate through here. you will also see two small

openings in the brick work. one on the first floor, and one of the second floor. those were from the little room on the other side called the candle room. in that opening, they would place a lantern and that lantern was the only means of forination -- illumination this area. soldiers, who were cobbled boots with nail heads on the bottom, we have to don some sort of a wool or silk sock over their boots to enter this room and work in here. designed towas beginners and with 500 troops. it was never fully garrisoned and never fired a single shot. i suspect it was obsolete by the time it was completed because armaments were advancing so rapidly.

for a long time that some caretakers came along and lived in it and watched over it and in world war ii, they built the concrete pad that we see in the parade ground and that was used to store what they called for peters. we now call them mines that were used in an elaborate system throughout the day. u-boats came into the bay. they were manufactured to islands over. there is an old building still in place or you can see where the mines were manufactured and tested in the was a narrow gauge walkway where they would bring them here and store them. eventually, the fort was put on the national register and i think it was 1971 city of portland acquired the property and since then, it has remained neglected and just recently, the city has taken a renewed

interest in the property and now we have the army corps of engineers doing hazard mitigation, making it safer, because probably due to social media, this place is on everyone's radar. it ande is curious about everyone wants to be here and experience this space. isends of fort gorges committed to seeing that this place does not fall apart. we know we can say the structure. itn it becomes about making accessible to more people so we can have a sustainable model to do the work that needs to be done and then, it becomes about stewardship, making sure that this wonderful spot never falls into the hands of condo development or a casino or something that would be inappropriate for this space. there are lots of challenges. ,he immediate ones are access because this is an island so

everyone needs to come here by boat. luckily, it is only one mile from land. two thirds of the 7000 people that come here in the summertime are coming by kayak and some come from the islands and some from the mainland and they do chores here all day everyday, they bring people out the kayak all summer long. kayaking is the easiest way to get here because you're not bound by tides, you do not need to worry about your boat and it is one mile. we encourage people who do that to hire a guide or have some experience. you can also come out with a boat. we are hoping in the coming just to put a dock in and make this more accessible to the general population. i have been coming here since i was a teenager and it is a mystical place. especially when you start coming here as a child, like i said before, we do not build structures like this anymore so it is unique.

it is still the place like this that i know of in maine that is this accessible. one mile from shore and you have this amazing structure that we will never see again. we have to save it. fors special to me because a long time now, i have wanted to see some kind of performance happen here. shakespeare or something along those lines. it is important to people who live here and visit here, for the reasons i mentioned before. everyone is affected by this space. how could you not be. and you step through the port and internet parade ground and see those casemate archways and all the stonework, it is phenomenal. of the time, people's jaws drop when they see this.

>> you can watch this and other programs on the history of communities across the country at c-span.org. is american history tv only on c-span3. this year marks the centennial of u.s. precipitation in world war i. in the second of a two point program, library of congress. her continues his tour of the exhibit echoes of the great war, american experiences of world war i. >> here you have a number of postcards of african-american soldiers. this is common for both white and african-american soldiers. they would have pictures taken and converted into postcards. some are taken domestically in training camps, some are taken abroad in europe. most are taken in europe. 300 is significant is

50,000 african-americans go overseas to serve in the military. mostly as camp laborers or clerical positions. there were about 50,000 soldiers that do serve in combat positions for the french. the three 69th, three 70th, three 71st and -- and 372nd.h, 371st, this is a regimental bands that played a lot of jazz and ragtime tunes and they are famous among another of regimental bands for the military. they got around and play for not only french, italian and american soldiers and sometimes even german prisoners of war but also, visiting american journalists. ♪

>> the impact of this is that it spread american jazz to europe and really popularize is this form of music. in its own way, its facilitates the civil rights movement but culturally because the idea of jazz was you have whites and blacks and europeans and americans sharing a space and enjoying the same kind of cultural moment. ♪