Enslaved workers left their marks in bricks of Civil War-era fort, Georgia photos show

The nearly 25,000,000 bricks used in a towering Civil War-era fortress in Georgia echo the history of the Black enslaved workers tasked with building it from the ground up.

Photos shared by the Fort Pulaski National Monument on Monday show pieces of that history were left behind in fingerprints and handprints still embedded in the bricks centuries later.

“Though it took eighteen years for Fort Pulaski to be completed, the names and stories of the enslaved people who made the bricks for the fort have been hidden and, in many cases, lost,” according to a post shared on the monument’s Facebook page. “There are still echoes of their story, however, which can be found in the very bricks themselves.”

A series of fingerprints are visible as indentations on Casemate 16 at the military fort, a close-up photo shows.

Fort Pulaski sits on Cockspur Island, about 15 miles west of downtown Savannah, and was considered a “technical and architectural marvel of its time,” according to the National Park Service. Built in the 19th century, it was occupied by both Confederate and Union troops during the Civil War and later served as a stop on the Underground Railroad for enslaved people seeking freedom.

The fortress was also the site of a “fifty-day siege and two-day artillery battle” that marked the first use of rifled artillery in U.S. military history, the website states.

Most of the bricks used to build Fort Pulaski were made locally by enslaved men, women and children who “spent each day laboring to make bricks for a fort built to protect the port made rich from their labor,” officials wrote in a Facebook post.

Brick-making was a tedious process that involved mixing soil and water that was then stomped into clay before the mixture was packed into wooden molds. Sticks and other debris had to be removed by hand, and the still-wet brick would be set out to dry for days, according to the post.

The dried bricks would then harden in a kiln for nearly a week before being shipped to Cockspur Island to be used for building.

Centuries later, Fort Pulanski stands strong with walls that tower 22 feet high inside and are an average of 5 to 11 feet thick of solid brick, according to the National Park Service. Officials said the visible fingerprints serve as a “tangible reminder” of the enslaved Americans who made the fortress what it is today.

“There is another vitally important story that sits right in front of our eyes if we only just look for it,” the post concludes.

Historians find fingerprints of long-forgotten SC slaves in 200-year-old bricks