Fort Adams, Newport, RI

Well, I am up here all alone in Newport. No Honey, no Boys. It is not much fun. We bust our buns on these classes day in and day out. The other night I fell asleep working on the next days reading assignment, after about 4 hours of Review and Discussion questions. It is a real grind. Luckily the weekends are ours. I slept in on Saturday and a guy who brought his car pulled me out of my funk and we drove around Historic Downtown Newport for a while.

We ended up at Fort Adams, named after John Adams, and took a one hour tour. We saw the construction, heard how they lived, saw the impenetrable walls, and then learned that it had never once been attacked. I am putting in a few pix, but you cannot imagine until you see it how massive it is. I am sure they leaked the plans to the British and it was never attacked because they knew it would never work. Anyway, I guess Dolly Madison could have used one of these on the Potomac!


This is an example of the huge cannons they were using. This one fired a 24 pound ball, the bigger ones did 32 pounders.


This was what they called the 'Three Tiers of Firepower' where on the top level they fired for the masts and rigging, the mid-level was for the decks, and the bottom they went for the waterline. Later, during World War II they changed these to a movie theatre, a pool hall, and a bowling alley. That's when they started calling this, I am not making this up, the 'Country Club of the US Army'.

The walls were thick enough to stop people, and I think the guide described every area outside the gates as a 'killing field.' He did it so often I started looking at the kids in the group to see if they were scared. They weren't, of course. Then he showed us these 'listening tunnels' to see how they stopped people from tunneling under the walls. They were very dark, dripping wet, and reminded me of the Cask of Amontillado.

This is the upper level of tunnels where they had loopholes for creating the 'killing fields', the next level down was much darker, and they wouldn't take us in the level below that, but, you get the point. The cielings were an easy six feet, then down to five, then lower in the lowest tunnels. They used over 4 million bricks in this fort. Gotta go, love you all, when you come up we will go here. The tour guide rocked.