Dry Tortugas National Park

Historic brick from Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas National Park museum collection

NPS Photo

Interested in Civil War forts? Working on a school project about sooty terns? This page will get you started on your exploration into the natural and cultural histories of Dry Tortugas National Park.

Historical and scientific information can be found in many places online. Some of the links below are to other National Park Service (NPS) web sites; more link to other libraries and archives.

National Park Service information sites:

• Photographs from the Dry Tortugas National Park archive are available through the Open Parks Network, a cooperative effort between the National Park Service and Clemson University. Not all photographs in the park collection are available online.

• Harpers Ferry Center, part of the National Park Service, houses the NPS history collection, commissioned art collection, AV and film collection, and other material, parts of which are available online in the NPGallery through the Harpers Ferry web page. We recommend searching using the word tortugas and choosing list view when the results appear.
• Historical maps and drawings as well as more NPS reports may be found on the NPS Technical Information Center web site.
• A wealth of articles, reports, and other data mostly about the science of Dry Tortugas National Park is available through the NPS Data Store. More than 500 entries date as far back as 1878.

Historical reports and documents on the history of Fort Jefferson:

• NPS Heritage Documentation Programs Digital Media: Harbor Light Virtual Tour, Fort Animation, Harbor Light Animation, Drawings, and Photographs (2015-2018)
• History of Fort Jefferson (1936)
• Historic Structure Report--Historical Data Section--Fort Jefferson, 1846-1898, by Edwin C. Bearss (1983)
• Garden Key Cultural Landscape Report (2011)
• Dry Tortugas National Park: Submerged Cultural Resources Assessment (1993)

Studies of and plans for the natural science resources at Dry Tortugas NP:

• Implementing the Research Natural Area Science Plan: The 5-Year Report (2012)
• Assessing the Conservation Efficacy of the Dry Tortugas National Park Research Natural Area (2015)
• Geologic Resources Inventory Report, Revised April 2014
• Dry Tortugas National Park Vegetation Map (2009)

Information about Dry Tortugas National Park held by other institutions:

• The National Archives of the U.S. houses the original documents from the construction and occupation of Fort Jefferson as a military installation. Most documents are in record group 393: Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1817-1947.
• The collections of the Library of Congress document the history of Fort Jefferson, most notably through the photographs and plans produced by the Historic American Buildings Survey. For legislation relating to Fort Jefferson National Monument and Dry Tortugas National Park, search the web site of the U.S. Congress.
• The Key West branch of the Monroe County Public Library has an extensive Florida history collection, including documents from and photographs of Fort Jefferson. Digital access to many items is available.
• The Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives houses over 35,000 hours of video tape and 23 million feet of film documenting Florida history, including Miami TV station news stories about Dry Tortugas.
• In the first half of the 1900s the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., maintained a marine biology laboratory on Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas. Photographs are available online through the U.S. Geological Survey ScienceBase. The yearbooks published by the institution with reports from the marine laboratory are available online through the Internet Archive; search "carnegie institution." The park has also acquired digital images of the entire Carnegie Institution archive related to the marine laboratory at Dry Tortugas and hopes to provide online access soon; in the meantime, please contact us with questions.
• The University of Miami Digital Collections include the Civil War letters of Calvin Shedd, including several written from Fort Jefferson and Key West. The Floyd and Marion Rinhart Photograph Collection includes thirteen images of life at Fort Jefferson in the 1800s; the photos are related to Joseph B. Holder, who lived at the fort.
• Looking for natural specimens? The web site for Integrated Digitized Biocollections contains many specimens from Dry Tortugas National Park curated by institutions across the U.S., including our principal partner, the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

For more information about the museum and archive collections from DryTortugas National Park held at the South Florida Collections Management Center--the NPS museum facility in Everglades National Park--visit the Using the Collections page or contact the staff through the Contact Us page.