By 1923, the two forts at the mouth of Tampa Bay had been declared obsolete and abandoned. The airplane had made coastal-defense batteries pointless, and a direct hurricane in 1921 had wrecked much of Fort Dade's infrastructure on Egmont Key. The Army packed up and left, posting a lone caretaker and walking away from a small village's worth of empty buildings: barracks, officers' quarters, a movie theater, brick streets running between dark windows. It was, in other words, the perfect place to hide.
The timing could not have been better for a particular kind of entrepreneur. Prohibition had taken effect nationally in 1920, and Tampa, long one of the “wettest” towns in Florida, had no intention of going dry. The bay's geography made it a smuggler's dream. The Gulf was a highway from Cuba and the Bahamas, where rum and whiskey were perfectly legal, and the long, broken coastline of mangrove islands and hidden channels offered endless places to land a boat and offload cargo before running it north. An abandoned fort on an isolated island at the very mouth of the bay, with deep-water access and a commanding view of everything coming and going, was practically purpose-built for rum-running.
So through the 1920s and into the 1930s, bootleggers moved into the ghost town the Army had left behind. They used the emptied buildings of Fort Dade to stash liquor, sheltering their contraband in the same quarters that had once housed coastal artillerymen. The island that had been built to guard Tampa Bay against a foreign navy now helped slip illegal booze past the U.S. government, a turn of events nobody who poured the fort's concrete could have predicted.
It didn't last, and the way it ended was spectacular. On at least one occasion, federal agents, frustrated at trying to root smugglers out of the maze of abandoned structures, simply set the island's dry grass on fire to smoke the bootleggers out. The fire did far more than that. It tore through the brush and the wooden buildings of the old fort, and according to accounts drawn from later oral histories, the blaze grew so large it could be seen across the bay in Ybor City. By the time it burned out, roughly thirty-five of Fort Dade's buildings had been destroyed. Whatever the agents had hoped to accomplish, they had effectively erased a large part of the fort in the process. The Army later came back and demolished much of what remained.
Between the fire, the demolition, and the relentless erosion that has been eating Egmont Key for a century, very little of Fort Dade's once-substantial village survives today. Some buildings remain, intact or half-swallowed by tropical growth, and the brick streets still run their old grid through the scrub, but the comfortable little military town that once had a theater and a bowling alley is mostly gone. A piece of it was lost not to enemy action, not to a hurricane, but to a Prohibition-era smoke-out that got dramatically out of hand.
There's a fittingly Florida quality to the whole episode. A fort that never fired its guns in a real war was finally, partially, destroyed in the “war against alcohol,” torched by its own government in pursuit of men hiding bottles in the barracks. The enemy fleet the fort waited eighty years for never came. The rum-runners did, and the fire meant to flush them out did more damage to Fort Dade than any foreign power ever managed.