18161776 Club
One cannonball finds the powder magazine, and Negro Fort is gone in an instant
Roughly 275 of the fort's 330 residents, mostly escaped slaves, die in the deadliest single cannon shot in American history.
By the summer of 1816, a British-built fort on the Apalachicola River in Spanish Florida had become the largest gathering of escaped slaves in the South since before the Revolution, armed with ten cannons and defended by maroons, Seminoles, and Choctaw. Southern planters demanded it be erased. On July 27, a heated cannonball fired from US Navy Gunboat No. 154 struck the fort's magazine, detonating 73 kegs of gunpowder. The blast killed about 275 people in seconds and was heard in Pensacola, more than 100 miles away…
