{"id":154,"date":"2010-07-28T10:03:33","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T14:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/?p=154"},"modified":"2010-07-30T09:42:48","modified_gmt":"2010-07-30T13:42:48","slug":"fort-couch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/2010\/07\/28\/fort-couch\/","title":{"rendered":"Fort Couch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Named for General Darius Couch<\/a>, Fort Couch was one of three forts constructed in an attempt to control the high ground on the West Shore of the Susquehanna River to protect Harrisburg<\/a>, the capitol of Pennsylvania. It was never finished because it was unneeded after the Confederates left the area.\u00a0 Fort Couch was built on the higher ground to the west of Fort Washington to protect it.\u00a0 Fort Washington, the primary fort in the area, was the only one to be brought to completion.\u00a0 It was located to the west of the Susquehanna River and is today on private property.\u00a0 The third fort\u2019s location and name are unknown.<\/p>\n

The forts primarily consisted of earthen platforms with mounted cannon.\u00a0 Because they anticipated that the Confederates would march into Harrisburg along the Carlisle Pike and across today\u2019s Market Street Bridge, the cannons were primarily built facing the road.\u00a0 The forts were quickly constructed by railroad construction gangs.\u00a0 While some men were constructing the forts, others were busy cutting down trees and clearing the fields with fire in order to clear the line of fire to the road.<\/p>\n

Civilians thought the forts were \u201cformidable\u201d and \u201cimpregnable\u201d but military men thought they were built too quickly and would have rapidly fallen apart if attacked by cannon.\u00a0 These theories were not tested because the forts were never attacked.<\/p>\n

There are many accounts that the soldiers stationed at Fort Couch did not treat the locals very well.\u00a0 One man noted that \u201cthe New Yorkers were here, and we fed them as long as we had anything.\u00a0 They turned out to be our worst enemies.\u00a0 They killed our hogs, chickens and so on.\u201d[i]<\/a>\u00a0 Another said that the New York troops were \u201ca bad set of fellows \u2026[who took] everything they could lay their hands on.\u201d[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 The men building the forts were not any better.\u00a0 They purposely went out of their way to antagonize Will Kiester, the only homeowner in the area, by building the fort through his vegetable garden and chopping down the trees in his front yard.<\/p>\n

The original breastworks and the monument can be found at the\u00a0intersection of 8th Street and Indiana Avenue in Lemoyne.<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Robert Grant Crist.\u00a0 Confederate Invasion of the West Shore \u2013 1863<\/em>.\u00a0 (Carlisle, PA: Cumberland County Historical Society, 2002), 25.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Named for General Darius Couch, Fort Couch was one of three forts constructed in an attempt to control the high ground on the West Shore of the Susquehanna River to protect Harrisburg, the capitol of Pennsylvania. It was never finished because it was unneeded after the Confederates left the area.\u00a0 Fort Couch was built on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[3987],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war-1861-1865","tag-lemoyne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}