Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1888 — The Old Stone Fort. [ARTICLE]

The Old Stone Fort.

The thickest stone walls snd the heaviest old-fashioned doors in the city are those of Castle Garden. Since the premises have been appropriated by the Commissioners of Immigration it has been almost forgotten that Castle Garden occupies the same site and uses the same old walls that were constructed for Fort Clinton in the year 1807. At the main entrance hang the same massive doors that were first put there. They were probably never removed, because it would have been too much trouble to do so, and they were closed because it takes a very strong force to swing each one of them. They are about sixteen feet high by six feet wide, and fully eight inches thick, of solid hard-wood, iron mounted all over, and the three ponderous hinges on which each one is supported fairly groan with the weight when the door is moved. It is estimated that it would take at least twenty men to lift each door. The stone walls here are eight feet thick, but that is not the greatest thickness. About a year ago the lessee of the restaurant privileges in the Garden thought that he discerned a door on one of the interior faces of the wall which had been barricaded up for generations. He cleared away the debris and discovered a very narrow passage several yards long leading into an arched * vault of large dimensions, which was probably the powder magazine of the old fort. The walls are so thick that from the exterior the position of the magazine could not be determined, and there is but the one opening to the apartment. Another door was also discovered at the same time, which admitted the explorer to a duugeon-like cell, into which streamed a solitary ray of light through a loophole in a wall which was fully twenty feet thick. What the original design of this place was has not been ascertained, but the restaurant man utilized it for a refrigj erator, a? it is always very dry and ! cool. Entrances to other passages beneath the prison flooring were also | discovered. They were probably intended for underground exits in case of danger but are now partly filled with water. The visible exterior traces of the old fort are chiefly the numerous port-holes in the wall all around the rotunda. The lower sill of each port-hole is four feet eight inches from the ground, and they are seven feet apart. The wall of the fort is twenty-two feet high and in no place less than eight feet thick. There are, in fact, two walls, an exterior oSe of stone, and an interior one of brick. The rotunda is two hundred feet in diameter.