There are few men in the early American history of Escambia County, Florida and of this region, who had more influence than a man named William H. Chase. Although his business efforts touched on many ventures, he is best remembered as a fort builder.
Chase was born in the far north in 1798. In 1815, after graduating West Point, he joined the U. S. Army’s Corp of Engineers and began to acquire the knowledge of fortifications. By 1819 he was involved with fort construction in Louisiana and in 1828 he was sent to begin defenses for the navy’s most important planned Gulf Coast installation - the Pensacola Bay shipyards. In 1825, the navy’s Commodore Warrington had determined that the location for the yards would be almost directly north of the entrance to the bay, and that forts would be needed to protect the mouth of the bay. In May 1828, Congress appropriated $50,000 to begin construction. In early 1829 Lieutenant Chase was made building superintendent of the bay’s first defense at the west end of Santa Rosa Island.
The construction of forts were massive projects. The materials often had to be shipped long distances, but the needed brick for this fort were available locally. Escambia clay was some of the best on the coast and brick had been made here since the Spanish period. Chase, who was notoriously cost conscience, believed that he could cut costs by using local brick. Unfortunately, on his first tour Chase’s aid was disappointed to see the poor quality of local brick.
Brickmaking at that time was a slave industry and black men were either owned or leased by the brickmakers. Area brickmakers had no machinery for mixing clay and bricks were formed in non-uniform wooden molds and scraped over with a board rather than cut with wires. Brick had never been in great demand here because buildings were constructed with cheap, abundant yellow pine and shipping brick to other cities was expensive.
Chase expected the brickmakers to jump for joy at the thought of becoming rich through selling to the government, but they apparently did not. They were slow to deliver and disinclined to supply the correct dimensions needed, even at a generous $10 per thousand. Chase soon lit a fire under the local companies, after he whispered that brickworks at Mobile would also soon supply the fort. By the first of April, nearly 900,000 Escambia bricks were delivered to the island project, and then double that number by the middle of June. With much improved quality and quantity, Chase would later cut the price paid to $9 per thousand.
Chase was described as a brash, vain and ambitious man accustomed to doing things his way, circumventing regulations when he thought it proper and subverting the chain of command when he wished to make suggestions. He knew how to use his position as construction supervisor of coastal forts to help himself become rich. In Pensacola he worked with a well-to-do friend, Byrd C. Willis of Virginia, to begin a new brickworks which quickly earned a contract to supply the fort; some say Chase was his silent partner. Chase also made money through contracting workers. Opting not to use government employees, he hired the firm of Underhill and Strong, which also worked with him on fort projects in Louisiana, to supply a large number of “black mechanics and laborers”, a hidden term for slaves. The company also supplied white brick-masons from the north to supplement a shortage of slave masons. Coincidently, the senior partner in the firm of Underhill and Strong was Jasper Strong, Chase’s brother-in-law.
As construction of the Pensacola Bay fort neared completion, names had been offered for the works. The Secretary of War chose to name it after Andrew Pickens, a Revolutionary War hero. Chase notified the Army of the completion in October 1834, and Fort Pickens was garrisoned at the end of the year. Among the materials in its walls were 21.5 million brick, more than 26,000 casks of lime, 1000 casks of cement, 159,000 board feet of lumber and 260,000 pounds of lead. First estimates of the fort’s cost were $465,300, but it was actually more like $677,000.
During the years of the Pickens construction, Chase had worked on several other coastal sites. In 1838 he was made Senior Officer of Engineers on the Gulf Coast, overseeing fortifications from Louisiana to Key West. His contract methods would make the U.S. government the largest purchaser of slave labor in the nation. In 1840 Chase began work on the sister defenses of Fort Pickens, a project that would last until his retirement in 1856. And, this is only part of the story of achievements here by William Chase.
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