Fort Adams

The fort at Newport Harbor was designed to make an attack costly from either land or sea. Construction of the present Fort Adams began in 1824 and continued until 1857. Army engineers Simon Bernard and Joseph G. Totten shaped a system of angled walls, overlapping fire, casemates, and underground galleries around the narrow entrance to Narragansett Bay, one of the country’s most useful naval anchorages.

A smaller fort had already occupied the point. A brick work named for President John Adams was completed in 1799, then replaced by the far more ambitious granite fortification begun in 1824. The distinction explains why the site’s history begins before the great walls: engineers inherited a strategic position and redesigned it as the nation’s military needs grew.