Did you know there are 28 state historic sites in North Carolina?

Wonder which one is the most popular?

A couple of hints.

It's located in Kure Beach, it was key to the Civil War and it has a brand new visitor center.

Let's join Rick Sullivan for a walk through the Fort Fisher Visitor Center.

- Fort Fisher was America's biggest sandcastle ever.

Fort Fisher was an earthen fort because that was the material available to build Fort Fisher and also it had the side benefit of being a superior material to brick and masonry and stone with the advancements in artillery.

- [Rick] That's because sand was really good at absorbing the artillery bombardments that were happening here at Fort Fisher more than 160 years ago.

[canon fires] But when it comes to designing and building a new visitor center to detail what happened here, the more hardened building materials have been used to create this highly functional and modern facility that can handle the massive tourist traffic today.

- There are 27, I believe, historic sites throughout the whole system, by far we have the most visitation.

Our visitation finally broke a million visitors a year in 2021, and that was up from what I saw in 2007, which was around just under 600,000 visitors a year, and I've watched it climb over the years.

From an architectural standpoint, if you haven't noticed, this building was very much designed with the views in mind with all the glass and all the windows and the vistas, and we wanted something fairly modern.

This building is three times the size of the old building at 23,000 square gross feet.

It also has many more amenities.

We have expanded the size of the exhibit gallery.

We have a activity hall that is available for special events and rentals.

[guns firing] - [Rick] On the day this story was filmed, Fort Fisher was observing the 160th anniversary of the fall of the fort.

On that day, January 15th, 1865, the fort was overrun by the Union Army, thus cutting off Confederate access to Wilmington's Port.

Just a few months later, the Civil War was over.

- At the time the fort fell, General Sherman was running roughshod throughout the South.

General Grant was battling General Robert E. Lee outside of Richmond and Robert E. Lee and the army in northern Virginia kind of had their backs against the wall.

And Lee himself had said that, "If Fort Fisher falls, "I cannot sustain the Army, that we are finished."

- [Man] Mark!

- [Rick] Here at Fort Fisher, there are no admission charges to walk the grounds, walk inside the earthen mounds, visit the scenic ocean front trails, and to go everywhere the Confederate and Union soldiers would've gone back in the 1860s.

But the best starting point is the Visitor Center, also free of charge, where you'll get the background information about the site and what happened here.

- Our mission statement is to preserve and interpret this historic battlefield for present and future generations.

And our specific goal here at Fort Fisher, and we have been hammering away at this for years now and it fed into the creation of our new exhibits, was that we want Fort Fisher to be a place where any American and anybody from anywhere in the world really can come here and go through our exhibits and go through this site and find some sort of a human connection across time that connects with them.

[upbeat music] - Fort Fisher State Historic Site is at 1610 Fort Fisher Boulevard South in Kure Beach, and it's open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

For more information, give the site a call at 910-251-7340. or go online to historicsites.nc.gov to find out more.