Rebel With 

 A Cause. 



By Sarah Friday Peters 



Gehrig Spencer played Jeopardy and the 

 category "Fort Fisher" flashed on the screen, his 

 fellow contestants would be in trouble. 



Spencer, Fort Fisher's historic site manager, 

 knows more about the last fort to fall in the Civil 

 War than anyone. 



Volumes of North Carolina Civil War history line 

 his office shelves. Notes, records, photos, letters 

 and diaries fill his file cabinets. And he's stored 

 hundreds of conversations and articles in his 

 "gray matter," as he likes to say. 



Now Spencer hopes the records will not be all 

 that's left of the fort's history. 



And he's not playing games with its future. 



"There's no place quite like Fort Fisher," 

 Spencer says. 



Painstaking research and reconstruction have 

 taken place to make the fort as authentic as 

 possible and to help people understand what 

 happened here, he says. 



Gehrig Spencer 



i 



"To lose the physical evidence of Fort Fisher 

 would be a tremendous loss," he adds. 



To look at the big piles of sand and mud 

 covered with grass and a few trees, it's hard to 

 see why. 



But to talk to Spencer and walk the grounds, 

 the concern becomes real. 



Since the state historic site opened in 1965, 

 Spencer has delved into the fort's past like a 

 rebel with a cause. 



He knows the history back and forth now, and 

 can quote passages from letters and diaries 

 verbatim. 



"There's no plate quite 

 like Fori Fisher," Spencer 

 says. 



You soon believe he must have been there, too. 



Spencer's intrigue comes from growing up in 

 nearby Brunswick County. 



Most of the troops came from that county, as 

 well as others in the area such as Bladen, Co- 

 lumbus and Cumberland counties. 



When Fort Fisher's construction began, most 

 of the troops were young, Spencer says. But by 

 the end of the war, junior and senior reserves 

 protected the fort. 



"They worked half a day, drilled half a day and 

 walked guard duty at night," he adds. If they took 

 leave, they went to Wilmington. They formed a 

 garrison band, sang, played cards, sailed and 

 looked forward to "boxes" from home. 



Like other Civil War troops, they ate salt pork, 

 biscuits and cornbread. One letter mentions col- 

 lards. "In this area," Spencer says, "they had 

 seafood delicacies as I would call it. . .fish and 

 oysters." 



Troops slept in basic barracks on the flat land 

 behind the fort. A telegraph station was set up in 

 one of the mounds; a hospital in another. 



No doubt, the fort and its men were strong. 



"We will be rite hard to whip," wrote J. A. 

 McNeil, a soldier from Robeson County. "We 

 works nine hours (through) hot day Com- 

 pared with what we has to put up with still we 

 has som fun. . . .We has a heap a satisfaction a 

 getting letters on one thing or another." 



And now Gehrig Spencer gets a heap of 

 satisfaction reading them. 



