The Start of the War

The first shots of the American Civil War were fired by Confederate artillery at Fort Sumter in South Carolina in 1861. The fort sits in Charleston harbour and is a five-sided brick structure, similar in layout to our Fort Pulaski model, although with higher walls.

Two battles were fought over it, imaginatively named the First and Second Battles of Fort Sumter. The Confederates took the fort from the Union in the first battle and despite an attempt to recapture it in 1863 (the second battle, when it was pretty much reduced to rubble) it remained in Confederate hands for the duration of the war.

Our new Sumter model is part of our Small Scale Scenery range – ideal for Aeronef, Land Ironclads or other 2mm or 1/1200th scale games. The main part of the fort is a single-piece resin casting, and it also has a large number of guns on the upper tier which are separate metal pieces. The model represents the fort as it was during the Civil War – nowadays the outline is the same, but in detail the fort is quite different.

To accompany Fort Sumter, we have a second, somewhat smaller and rather less significant installation from the Charleston area. Fort Palmetto is a rather grand name for what was really only a small 3-gun artillery battery. Palmetto was an earthen redoubt around 160 feet long with a buried magazine. The model would make a good stand-in for other small earth batteries from the Civil War or other periods. I made it because I came across an interesting article with a ground radar and 3D reconstruction of what the position may have looked like.

SSS-8064 – Fort Sumter – £9.00
SSS-8065 – Fort Palmetto – £1.50