Coastal Forts & the Civil War on Galveston Bay

The Texas coast was a Confederate lifeline. As the Union navy tightened its blockade of the South, Galveston remained the one major Texas port the Confederacy fought to keep — and by the end of the war it was the only significant port still in Confederate hands anywhere in the country. This driving trail follows the war along Galveston Bay and eastward to the Sabine, tracing the battles and coastal defenses that held the line. You'll stand where General Magruder retook Galveston in a daring New Year's assault in 1863, look out from the earthworks that guarded the bay's approaches, and drive the Bolivar Peninsula to the site of Fort Travis. Then the trail runs east along the coast to Sabine Pass, where a handful of Irish artillerymen under Dick Dowling turned back a Union invasion fleet in one of the most lopsided Confederate victories of the war — and where, eighty years later, new defenses would guard the same pass in a second world war. It is a trail about a coast that was, for four years, a front line.