Fort Moultrie’s Lost Battery: Battery Lord

Oct 10

5 min read

Following the Civil War, General Quincy Gillmore of the Army Corp of Engineers had Fort Moultrie rebuilt along the lines of the original fort. When minefields were incorporated into harbor defense, the Army needed a means of preventing enemy minesweepers from clearing the mines. To that end, three gun batteries were constructed within the walls of Fort Moultrie bearing on the shipping channel where mines would be planted when the port was threatened. These emplacements were named batteries Bingham (1899), McCorkle (1901), and Lord (1905). each incorporating breech-loading rapid-fire rifles. While Bingham was armed with British-made Armstrong 4.7-inch rifles, McCorkle and Lord were armed with 3-inch rifles that could fire up to 30 rounds per minute when operated by an experienced gun crew. Loading was manual and required a highly trained crew to feed ammunition to the rifles at a rapid rate. The effective range of the weapon was about 5 miles for the 15 lb. high explosive shell. The ammunition was known as fixed ammunition meaning that in a single shell contained both the propellant charge and the projectile with its explosive charge. This combination resulted in a shell that was approximately 36 inches long. Fort Moultrie visitors can see Batteries Bingham and McCorkle today but Battery Lord is no longer visible.

George Edwin Lord, in uniform (circa 1870s)

Photo by David Francis Barry, Denver Library Digital Collections

Battery Lord has an interesting, if not tragic, history and was part of the Fort Moultrie interpretation until the early 1970s. (see Unigrid 1972) It was named after Lt. George Edwin Lord, an army surgeon who died at the battle of the Little Big Horn on June 26, 1876. Recently, FCNP Board member Russell Horres journeyed to the battle site to learn more about Lt. Lord and where he died. George was born in Boston in 1846. He attended Lewistown Falls Academy in Auburn Maine and Bowdoin College. He earned a doctor of medicine degree in 1871 from the Medical College of Chicago (now Northwestern Medical School). Not one to be confined to a medical office, Dr. Lord enlisted in the US Army after medical school and was assigned to the 6th Infantry stationed at Fort Buford, North Dakota Territory, near the confluence of the Yellowstone River with the Missouri River.

1972 Unigrid

The pressure to settle the western territories and discovery of gold on lands reserved by treaty for the plains Indians resulted in military action against them in the 1870s. Most notable was the Sioux campaign of 1876 in which the 6th infantry took an active part. To locate the native Americans they were pursuing, General Alfred Terry, who fought on Morris Island during the Civil War, decided to send Col. George Armstrong Custer on a scouting expedition leaving Terry and the infantry to move west along the Yellowstone River. General Terry assigned Lt. Lord to the 6th Calvary as one of their three medical officers. The overland journey from Fort Buford had exposed the troops to bad water sources and Lt. Lord was suffering from the effects. Lord was given the opportunity to remain in camp rather than join Custer’s expedition but he refused, a fateful decision. Custer began his expedition on June 22 and on the morning of June 25, his scouts located an encampment along the Little Big Horn about 13 miles ahead. Custer decided to press the attack rather than wait for reinforcements. About noon Custer divided his 700-man force into three units and attacked the encampment of several thousand native American warriors. Riding ahead of his supporting units by almost 4 miles, Custer’s unit of about 210 troopers including Lt. George Lord was totally overwhelmed by the Native Americans and massacred in what became known as Custer’s Last Stand.

Arrow points to the site where Lt. Lord’s body was found on Last Stand Hill, Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument, Montana

Park Rangers at the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument were helpful in pointing out that two officers familiar with Lt. Lord, located his body the following day within 20 feet of where Custer fell. His remains are now in a mass grave on Last Stand Hill marked by a large monument to the soldiers who died there.

Russell Horres points to Lt. George Lord’s name on the monument to those killed on Last Stand Hill, Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument Montana

Almost 30 years after his tragic and untimely death, a new rapid-fire battery at Fort Moultrie was named Battery Lord. Though it did not see action in World Wars I and II, just eight years after Battery Lord was commissioned at Fort Moultrie, it was the site of a horrific accident that cost the lives of three enlisted men, the battery’s commander, and injured nine others. Capt. Guy B. Hanna was conducting a night firing exercise with the 3-inch guns of Battery Lord on May 22, 1913, when at about 10 pm the gun crew failed to realize that the firing pin in the breech plug had jammed in the fire position. When the loader slammed the breech mechanism closed but before it could be locked, the extended firing pin struck the ignitor on the shell and the resulting force blew off the breech plug, a piece of which flew 400 feet into the roof of a nearby house. The explosion was heard four miles away in Charleston and a boat loaded with physicians was quickly dispatched to render aid to the injured. Capt. Hanna, struck in the side by a fragment of the gun, was taken to the post-hospital and survived long enough to reassure his wife and sign off on his company’s fund book, saying he wanted to “die with a clear conscience”. Battery Hanna, a 3-inch gun battery at Corregidor in the Philippines, was named after Captain Hanna in 1919.

Fort Moultrie parade with 15-inch Rodman and Battery Lord, Fort Sumter in the background, Fort Moultrie, South Carolina

Battery Lord was kept in service through World War II and decommissioned in 1946. When Fort Moultrie became part of the National Park Service in 1960, Battery Lord was part of the initial exhibits. However, the interpretation of the site was complicated by the many different eras represented. After years of study, a master plan was designed that involved using the site to interpret 175 years of seacoast defense. The plan included removing above-ground parts of Battery Lord to restore the 1870s Rodman gun platforms and provide a walkway to a Civil War zone on the southwest angle. By the bicentennial of the of Battle of Sullivan’s Island in 1976, nothing remained of Battery Lord above ground.