As I rounded the ravelin, I still held a shred of desperate hope that the fort might be open, despite all the signage to the contrary. I had visited Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island the previous day, and it had been open despite everything I had seen online, saying that it wouldn't open for business until later in the month.
Obviously, my hopes were cruelly dashed by Fort Trumbull's locked gate.
Weirdly, the fort was built in the Egyptian Revival style, for which we can at least partially thank Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon's forays into Egypt at the end of the 18th century started a period of interest in Egypt's past for much of the western world, resulting in much discovery in Egypt and much odd aping of ancient Egyptian styles of architecture in the west. Which is fine & dandy, but the Egyptian craze was so all-encompassing in the early 19th century that starforts were being built in that style? In America?!
|