NJ Fort Mott State Park and An Announcement

An Announcement:

Hi Friends and Readers of Natural Mid-Atlantic,

I'll be migrating content over to a new Substack blog site as The Land Journals before Christmas 2025.

The benefit of this move is to bring back the subscription option that sadly the Blogger platform did away with. I lost over 200 subscribers when they did that and it's the #1 question I get regarding this blog, "How do I subscribe?" Well, currently you can't. But soon you can!

Additionally on Substack I have the ability to prevent AI from scraping my content. Since AI first started invading the blogosphere a year ago, this blog has been scraped several times to train AI technology. I'm not okay with that. Substack has the security features that protect my work. 

I already maintain a Substack site for my work in pilgrimage studies, Uphill Road  and I'm familiar with how the platform works, impressed with ways to build community around the subject and with others who are doing similar work. 

Natural Mid-Atlantic will continue on Blogger for a time, but I will no longer be adding content after Christmas 2025. After that it will simply exist. Please join me over on Substack where you can subscribe (!!) and where I'm making all content free, just as it is now. (But support is gratefully accepted!) 

A big change, necessary and exciting! 

Now, a post for last week's hike - 

Fort Mott State Park, November 1, 2025

Fort Mott on the Delaware River

I love a good environmental history adventure and this outing to Fort Mott State Park with my Drexel student grandson was a good one.  One of three defensive forts built on the Delaware River to protect Philadelphia in the early 1900s (Spanish-American War & WWI) Fort Mott's big guns were concealed behind an earthen berm, invisible from any enemy ships venturing upstream. If an enemy appeared, they were raised on elevator lifts to commence fire. Though the fort never fired its guns in defense, it did conduct frequent practice firings which "sounded like the end of the world." 
 

5-inch rifled battery gun

On this beautiful autumn day Koda and I roamed the grounds of the fort and walked along the ferry pier to do a little birding and botanizing. We maybe covering a relaxing two miles. When we entered the fort and clambered up the parapets, I realized we were being served up a heaping helping of  The World Without Us (Alan Weisman, 2008). 

Gun emplacement - Battery Harker

Nature was having a great time dismantling, dissolving, and occupying the place. A rickety range tower served as a hunting perch for a Peregrine Falcon. A berm-and-ditch defensive hill wore a crown of Eastern deciduous trees in their finest fall colors. Sassafras, Tulip Poplar, Hickory, and Oak saplings sprouted from the concrete floors of the gun emplacements. It was a jungle down there! 

With the concrete in decay, reacting with rainfall and air to form calcareous rubble in some places, I noted Cliff Ferns growing happily on the calcium-carbonate leached walls. One species, Blunt-lobed Woodsia, is more commonly found on natural limestone-bearing cliffs throughout the Appalachian Mountain range but here it was growing along ledges of mortared bricks on the banks of the Delaware. Calthemite formations including stalactites and wavy, watery sheets of flowstone oozed from the ceilings. We found bat droppings and the nests of this past summer's Barn Swallows in the dark recesses behind iron-barred gates. 

Gunnery Crew 

It was fun to think about the source stone that provided the concrete mixtures used to make the thirty-feet thick walls. Limestone, dolostone, and other carbonate rock types started out as the skeletal remains of small marine organisms. As rainwater and groundwater leaches through soil and bedrock overlying cave systems, carbonic acid forms to dissolve carbonate rock made up of all that ancient marine life to create the cool formations we see underground. And here we were seeing the same process play out on a human-built landscape made of concrete. 

Ferry Pier to Delaware

With all this carbonate running down the walls and permeating the ground, only plants that can grow in calcium-rich environments grow well here. We noted Hop Hornbeam and Red Cedar saplings and little Viburnum shrubs growing along the contact zone between concrete bunkers and the grassy soil-built berm. Little Bluestem, a native prairie grass, grew in the wheel grooves of a gun pit. Ebony Spleenwort, Cliff Ferns, and the delicate stems and leaves of a Wild Columbine clung to white stained ledges. 

Peace Magazine and rail tunnel

Barn Swallow nests 

Every available niche of abandoned and neglected wall, ditch, and berm was full of life. Mosses and liverworts adorned sunny alcoves, blanketing corners and edges with drapes of green and grey. I was reminded of my trips to the UK where gravestones become havens for diverse species of moss and lichens. There are field guides written by cemetery botanists and bryologists that make graveyards incredible places to do natural history.  Why not here, too? I think this old fort could offer its own field guide for plants, mosses, lichens, and animals that now occupy the place. 

Cliff Fern growing in calcareous concrete 

 I wondered if we were to abandon this place altogether - goodbye state park, visitors, people in general - how long would it take for nature to completely reclaim this ground? Starting with the algae that thrives in humid, damp places the entire structure becomes a terrarium of sorts from the inside out -  though I'm sure park staff do the occasional cleaning in the more accessible rooms. 

Ammo transfer hoist and green algae

Though fall migration for birds, butterflies, and dragonflies is coming to an end we observed plenty of aerial life that hovered, hunted, and flitted throughout the park. A dilapidated range tower where spotters once scanned the broad waters of the Delaware for enemy ships and called in firing ranges for the gunnery crews served as a perch for a loud Peregrine Falcon. The falcon launched several forays over the water hunting for ducks and other shorebirds and returned to the iron rails above us to scan again.  

Range Tower / Peregrine perch

Peregrine Falcon

Fort Mott reminds me of several of the old military installations I've visited on the Atlantic Coast, each reverting to a semi-wild state as it crumbles, rusts, and decays. The massive Cape May Bunker perched out on its wild Atlantic beach resembles a rocky outcrop where Cormorants and Gulls gather in their colonies. Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, is occupied by nesting owls and hibernating bats. Harbor Seals haul out on the flanks of the old battery at Fort Hancock on wild shores of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. These are some of the most fascinating places that prove nature is nothing if patient and persistent (even unrelenting) if given the opportunity.

Journal pages

Notes:

Check out my new YouTube Channel The Land Journals that now accompanies my Substack blog (of the same name) featuring the how-to's of natural journaling and natural history/conservation art.