Road Trip V - Fort Abrahm Lincoln

Sometimes we find ourselves in a place so captivating we would spend all our time in the park. We talked to the ranger in the museum and later with a docent and author that was giving the tours at the Commanding Officer's quarters. Rode our bikes around and in the late afternoon as the sun was fading, hiked up to the overlook.  

This is the view looking down from the blockhouses toward the Missouri River. The building you can see are the barracks and the Commanding Officer's quarters. 

 That is one of the four blockhouses used on the perimeter of the enclosure on the hilltop. The blockhouses are open and I have climbed one to stand looking out of the firing ports.

Fort Abraham Lincoln was a U.S. Army fort built on the banks of the Missouri River in 1873 along the construction route of the Northern Pacific Railroad. It was built on what had been Mandan tribal land until a smallpox outbreak killed about 95% of the settlement in 1837. The 150 survivors had abandoned the area and settled in with another nearby tribe.

There were no battles fought at the fort. The cavalry garrisoned here did participate in putting down a Sioux uprising in the summer of 1876. The commanding officer of the fort was Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and this is where they rode out from. 

The need for the fort was gone in less  than twenty years and the Army abandoned it in 1891. Local civilians stripped the fort to it's foundations for lumber, nails, and hardware, leaving only the foundations and memories.

In 1907, Pr. Theodore Roosevelt signed the land over to North Dakota for use as a park. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps had a unit assigned to the area. They built an administration building, offices, garages, roads, and the service buildings. They also worked from the foundations and surviving documents to rebuild the fort. 

None of the original buildings had survived. Everything in the park is a CCC reproduction. The layout of the fort, all the buildings, can been seen on a walk, with interpretive signs. Two barracks have been restored and set up to look as they did in 1875. The blockhouses and support buildings were rebuilt as well. The C.O.'s quarters was rebuilt later, in 1989 as part of the North Dakota Centennial. 

In addition to the structures in the fort, the CCC worked with a local Mandan woman who served as a historical resource to build a section of a Mandan village consisting of five full size lodgehouses. It is maintained and used to display artifacts and interpretive displays about the Mandan.

 The CCC administration building is now the park museum. This isn't mine, but it's a slideshow of pictures of the museum and the Mandan village set to music.