NEW CONCORD, Ky. — When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant attacked Fort Henry, Tenn., in 1862, he had Fort Heiman, Ky., in mind, according to Bill Mulligan, a Murray State University historian.

        In 1861, long-range cannons shooting across the Mississippi River from blufftops at Columbus, Ky., pounded Grant's troops at the battle of Belmont, Mo., Dr. Mulligan said.

        “Based on that experience, Grant did not want Fort Heiman completed before he moved up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers against Forts Henry and Donelson.”

        The battle of Fort Henry is in Civil War books, though most of the Rebel citadel has disappeared under Kentucky Lake. Fort Hei man, on the opposite shore, is all but forgotten. But most of that Southern bastion still clings to the wooded crest of a remote Calloway County hill near New Concord.

        Dr. Mulligan is a member of Friends of Fort Heiman, a group of western Kentuckians who hope the earthen battlements will become part of the national park system.

        “We think this site is a very important part of our region's history and should be purchased and preserved,” Dr. Mulligan said.

        The fort and its outer defenses — rifle pits, trenches and other works known as redans and redoubts — are remarkably well preserved, Dr. Mulligan said.

        “Fort Heiman is a good example of how, if you really leave something alone, it can last a long time.”

        Fort Heiman was to have replaced the poorly situated Fort Henry, which the Rebels built to check a Yankee invasion up the Tennessee River. But the Confederates didn't start work on Fort Heiman until after both sides invaded previously neutral Kentucky in September 1861.

        Fort Henry squatted on flat bottomland next to the flood-prone Tennessee. Dr. Mulligan said that after Gen. Lloyd Tilghman of Paducah took command, he issued a report in which he “wondered, very diplomatically, who the idiot was who built the fort on a flood plain. Tilghman then looked enviously across the river to the high ground. It was the logical place to defend the river.”

        Col. Adolphus Heiman, a Tennessean, directed construction on the fort that would bear his name.

        “The fact that the Confederates had started to work on the fort was not good news for U.S. Grant,” Dr. Mulligan said. “He decided to attack Fort Henry before Fort Heiman could be finished. He had learned a hard lesson at Columbus and Belmont.”

        Grant's army-navy expedition captured Fort Henry after a brief battle on Feb. 6, 1862. The Yankees seized incomplete Fort Heiman bloodlessly.

        On Feb. 16, 1862, Grant took nearby Fort Donelson, now a national military park, on the Cumberland River at Dover, Tenn. Afterward, the Civil War moved southward. Even so, rear area Union troops finished Fort Heiman and occupied it off-and-on for the rest of the war.

        Because the site is so isolated, Fort Heiman was left as it was after the war. Lakeside houses recently have been built near the fort, which is privately owned.

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