The day we accidentally stumbled on the ruins where Beyoncé filmed "Lemonade"

On walking into Fort Macomb on the rare day when the gates were open

Mar 08, 2023

The predicted high that day was 72. We wanted to be outside. We meant to spend the afternoon at Bayou Sauvage, home to the American Wigeon, the Short-billed Dowitcher and few unpopular mammals, including nutrias and feral hogs.

Newbie Orleans, having paid a previous visit to the reserve, suggested the idea. The mapping app routed us in a funny loop-de-loop down the highway; we blew past Bayou Sauvage without realizing it. Then we saw a sign for a fort TC vistied on an earlier trip, which he warned me was just a fence around some grass. Boring. But we were pretty close. What the hey?

The shoulder for the fort popped up faster than we thought. Just as TC promised, we saw lots of grass and some fencing. My traumatized sniffer, recently assaulted by stink on Decatur Street, etc., just appreciated being in a place that smelled clean and grassy. A brown pelican circled low over us, giving us the eye, feeling territorial and probably protecting her nest.

We meandered for a spell, standing on the banks of what I later discovered was Lake Catherine. The pelican, satisfied we weren’t egg snatchers, returned to her roost on the swing bridge.

Just to get some steps in, we walked. Then, behind some swung-open gates, we spied what looked like the ruins of an ancient Mediterraean monastery with a wild garden roof.

TC said during his prior visit, he’d probably just neglected to go far enough down the path to find the actual fort. We’re used to hypergroomed Midwestern historic sites like Fort des Chartes, where signs, and docents doing historical cosplay, are everywhere. We didn’t see any signage. No plaque. No re-enactors. We entered the front building through two enormous arched wooden doors, unmarked except for a poorly spraypainted pentagram.

The tempterature dropped 10 degrees once we stepped inside; we wandered down crumbling corridors where shelf ferns grew out of the bricks, and the sound of water lapping outside the windows echoed through the corridors.

The only other thing we heard: faint voices of the few other folks who’d visited that day, a family (who arrived by boat, and I guess crawled through one of the large windows?) and three goth kids doing a photo shoot.

We never made it to Bayou Sauvage. We spent the afternoon walking through the corridors of what we later discovered was Fort Macomb. Built in 1822, it was part of an ambitious seacoast defense plan enacted after the war of 1812 — the federal government spent $800,000 (which is still a whole lot of cash!) building 42 forts, including Macomb, which was built for the then-not-tiny sum of $350,000, along with Fort Pike, which began construction in 1819 and was completed in 1826.

Fort Macomb’s purpose was guarding the west shore of Chef Menteur Pass where it feeds into Lake Pontchartrain.

We learned we’d visited Macomb only after we left. We also discovered the open gates were strange — Macomb is not open to the public. It’s considered unsafe, deteriorating due to lack of maintenance, exposure to weather, and damage suffered during Hurricanes Katrina, Gustav and Isaac. (Perhaps the Park Service had given permission to the photo shoot goths to work onsite, and we accidentally rode in on their black velvet coattails.)

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Fort Pike was open to the public before the storms, so it was eligible for FEMA money, but it’s now closed and deteriorating, as well. Both are listed on the National Register for Historic Places; Macomb’s application was submitted in the late 1970s. Despite that designation, both are currently in danger of being lost. Louisiana says it just doesn’t have the money to restore or maintain them. The current estimate for rehab is $50 million, which is $10 million more than the annual budget for maintaining the whole of Lousisiana’s state parks system.

Historic Register applications are often the richest, most interesting source of information on a historical site, mixing quirky anecdotes with architectural deep dives. Because I’m more a building-hugger than a military history buff, I’ll quote this passage about how Pike and Macomb came to be, including backstory on the forts’ designer, Simon Bernard:

In 1816, President James Madison placed the distinguished French General Simon Bernard, who served brilliantly as an engineer under Napoleon, in charge of planning systems of coastal defense for the United States. Upon receiving his commission in America, Bernard immediately turned his attention to the defense of the Mississippi Delta where memories of recent British penetration were vivid.

In 1817, he personally surveyed the Chef Menteur Pass and designed the magnificent semi-circular, bastioned, casemated fort to replace a small earthern battery erected on the site by American forces during the Battle of New Orleans.

This fort, along with Ft. Pike (National Register) was the first of a new type of large bastioned casemated forts which was to replace the simple earthwork batteries which had been in use since the colonial period.

The decision to adopt this new policy of a comprehensive coastal fortification system was influenced by the British invasions in the War of 1812, and the successful defense of Baltimore harbor by Ft. McHenry.

Ft. Macomb was completed in 1827 and garrisoned in 1828. After completing his work on U. S. coastal fortifications in 1831, General Bernard returned to France where he was made a lieutenant general and aide to King Louis Philippe. He later served as general of engineers, was twice French minister of war and in 1834 made a peer of France.

Neither Macomb nor Pike saw military action, though Macomb was seized by Confederate troops during the Civil War. Fleeng soldiers burned down parts of the complex when they fled after the Union took New Orleans in 1862; after that, it was used by the First Louisiana Native Guard, one of the first all-Black units in the Union Army. It was decommissioned in 1871.

Fort Macomb, March 2023. The holes in the walls once held fireplaces.

There’ve been ongoing grassroots efforts to save both forts. Last summer, New Orleans native Ronnie Lahoste talked to Fox News about his mission to save Fort Macomb. The Friends of Fort Pike and Fort Macomb have led volunteer efforts on behalf of both sites for years; last fall, they worked with the Parks Department to open Pike for public tours (and curiously enough, a car show).

But as the Friends told the Times-Picayune, they feel more hopeful and excited about Macomb “because it's a little smaller, has more magazine rooms and is a lot more intact.”

As that NOLA.com article explains, Macomb is actually in bigger trouble, because it’s dependent on regular people donating money and rolling up their sleeves to help clean up the site. And sometimes those efforts are stymied by controllable factors — like the Coast Guard banging around with heavy equipment after Gustav, which damaged parts of the complex.

As any preservationist knows, saving buildings is not just a long game. It’s a long, long game. Sadly, that slow timeline dooms a lot of historic structures. During our trip, we saw this brick cairn — which was stacked a full decade ago by volunteers from National Relief Network and students from West Feliciana High School's JROTC — who traveled to Lousiana from Michigan.

The fear, of course, is that eventually Pike and Macomb will eventually not exist, like Fort de La Boulaye. Built in 1700 by French colonial troops, the military abandoned it in 1707; it was used as trading post for a few more years, then largely forgotten until 1930. As this 1936 article in the Louisiana Quarterly explains:

Always man's curiousity has given him knowledge; out of questiong in musty books and following the bleached little creeping “things that gnaw patiently through dry pages,” comes history. So it was in this instance. Curiosity about the markings on an old map — one quadrangle and one-half hidden word. 'Fort' it said. And four men wondered, “what fort?”

Fort Macomb’s left big marks on history, so it may be more in danger of being lost, rather than forgotten. True Detective shot some episodes here, for one. I’m not a fan of crime and/or murder shows, so I’ll cite Fort Macomb’s other big moment of fame: it’s where Beyoncé filmed part of her 2016 visual album, Lemonade. You can see Macomb around the 3:00 mark.

Is it as lovely and dreamlike as it appears in Lemonade? Yes. Maybe more so? And if Ronnie Lahoste and the Friends group raise enough money to pay people to restore it, that’ll be a known fact, a common experience.