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Model of the fort.
Photo courtesy of the University Press of Florida.
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In 1837, Major William Lauderdale was ordered to raise four companies of Tennesseans to fight in Florida's Second Seminole War. Lauderdale marched south from Fort Jupiter and reached the New River on March 5, 1838. His troops completed a double-tiered blockhouse on the river's banks on March 10 and a larger picket around the blockhouse in April. Following the prevailing custom of naming forts after their engineers, General Thomas Jesup named it Fort Lauderdale. With minor exceptions, expeditions from the fort failed to find and engage Seminole warriors. The troops moved out when their six-month enlistment was completed, abandoning the fort only two months after completing it. The war continued and soldiers returning to reoccupy Fort Lauderdale in February 1839 found it burned and built a new fort. Abandoned in 1842, Fort Lauderdale was reoccupied in 1856-57 for the Third Seminole War but quickly abandoned again as swampy and uninhabitable. Years later, a house of refuge for shipwrecked sailors occupied the site that had been the fort. In 1924 the Coast Guard established Coast Guard Base Six at that location. The Bahia Mar development now covers the area that was the original Fort Lauderdale.
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