Fort Clinch State Park in Nassau County, Florida

Photograph: Fernandina Beach FL Fort Clinch fort18.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Nassau County attraction

Fort Clinch State Park

Nassau County · North Florida & First Coast

Eleven hundred acres at the northern tip of Amelia Island, built around a brick fort begun in 1847 and never finished.

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

It was named for General Duncan Lamont Clinch of the Seminole wars. No shot was ever fired at it in anger. Confederate troops held it briefly in 1861 and pulled out in 1862, and Union forces walked back in without a fight, which is the whole of its combat record and a large part of why so much of it survives. Florida bought two hundred and fifty-six acres including the fort in 1935 and the park opened to the public in 1938, the Civilian Conservation Corps having done the work. Costumed interpreters run living history weekends each month, drilling, cooking, working the laundry and the infirmary and sleeping in the barracks as the garrison did. Outside the walls there are several miles of beach on two sides of the peninsula, a fishing pier, a six-mile hiking trail, boardwalks and paved roads for cycling. Two campgrounds take visitors, forty-one sites on the Amelia River and twenty-one behind the Atlantic beach. This is a gateway site on the Great Florida Birding Trail. Open eight until sundown all year

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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