For every visitor who stands among Battery Laidley's great mortars, almost none ever see Battery Bigelow, because the Gulf took it. Bigelow was the fort's smaller, second battery, two quick-firing guns set close to the water to do the one job the mortars could not. It also paid the price of standing nearest the sea: erosion undermined it, and it crumbled into the surf, where only tumbled fragments of concrete remain.
Battery Laidley's mortars were devastating against a large warship at a distance, but they had a blind spot. Mortars are slow to load and aim, and they cannot reach anything close in; a fast torpedo boat could dart inside their minimum range and run for the channel before the great guns could respond. Battery Bigelow existed to close that gap. Roughly seven hundred feet seaward of Laidley, nearer the Gulf shore, it mounted two 3-inch, 15-pounder Driggs-Seabury rapid-fire guns, flat-trajectory weapons that could throw shells quickly at small, fast vessels in the near approaches. Together the two batteries covered the whole field: Bigelow the close and quick threats, Laidley the distant and heavy ones.
The battery was named, with Laidley, by the War Department order of 25 May 1903, for First Lieutenant Aaron Bigelow, an officer killed nearly ninety years earlier at the Battle of Lundy's Lane, the savage engagement on the Niagara frontier in July 1814 during the War of 1812. There is a quiet poignancy in the choice, a battery on a Florida sand spit, raised in a war against Spain, carrying the name of a man who fell fighting the British in Canada three generations before. It was the Army's long memory written onto the concrete, and the concrete did not last.
Battery Bigelow had been built, around 1901 and 1902, some two hundred feet back from the shoreline. That margin did not hold. The barrier islands at the mouth of Tampa Bay are restless things, made and unmade by storms and currents, and the shore in front of Bigelow steadily retreated. The 1921 hurricane, the first major storm to strike the bay since the Great Gale of 1848, began the battery's destruction in earnest, and erosion and later storms finished it through the following decade. By the early 1930s Bigelow had collapsed; by the 1970s its ruins were awash at high tide. Today only scattered, tumbled remnants of its emplacements remain at the water's edge.
Bigelow's fate is the small, local version of the larger story written all over these keys. The same forces that carved John's Pass in a single night in 1848, and that are eating Fort Dade into the Gulf on Egmont Key, took Battery Bigelow piece by piece. The fort was built to withstand the guns of an enemy fleet that never came. It could not withstand the sea.