Edited from the kiosk in the park- Joseph Ryder Lewis Jr. was a Carolina Beach resident, U.S. Army veteran, and member of the Federal Point Historic Preservation Society. Keenly interested in Cape Fear history, he donated 12 acres that included Confederate earthworks of the so-called “Sugar Loaf lines” to the Town of Carolina Beach for a public Civil War park. The Sugar Loaf lines served as auxiliary defenses to Fort Fisher 4½ miles to the south. They also helped guard Wilmington, North Carolina, the South’s main seaport for maritime trade with Europe, and by late 1864 the Confederacy’s most important city. Confederate blockade-runners, smuggled vital military supplies for General Robert E. Lee’s forces in Virginia, as well as goods for civilians, through the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Southern seaports. Great Britain became the Confederacy’s major trading partner. To protect the Confederacy’s “life preserving” business, engineers built a vast network of forts and batteries at the mouth of the Cape Fear River and along the beaches and river shores in both New Hanover and Brunswick Counties. Fort Fisher, which guarded the northern entryway into the river at New Inlet, became the strongest and best armed seacoast fortification in North America. As Union forces prepared to attack Fort Fisher in the autumn of 1864, Maj. Gen. W.H.C. Whiting, commander of the Department of the Cape Fear, expanded existing defenses to meet the serious threat. He selected a “strong position” on Federal Point, stretching from the headwaters of Myrtle Grove Sound (modern Carolina Beach canal) to Sugar Loaf Hill on the east bank of the Cape Fear River, for an extensive line of fieldworks. They would play an important role in the Wilmington Campaign, 1864-1865.

LiDAR image of the park

Another traverse