Civil War re-enactors dressed as Union troops commemorate the 1864 Battle of Fort Stevens every July. The National Park Service oversees the fort and 18 others around the Washington area. Photo by NPS/Nathan Adams

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When out-of-town guests stay over, you may want to plan an outing more unusual than to the Lincoln Memorial, the U.S. Capitol or the Smithsonian’s museums. Instead, the Washington area’s Civil War forts can make for interesting and less crowded destinations.

Around the city is a “ring of forts” — the remnants of a system of Civil War fortifications that, by 1865, totaled 68 forts and 93 batteries with more than 800 cannons. Some names survived, like Fort Totten, a Metro station, and Battery Kemble, a national park.

Now called the Civil War Defenses of Washington, most were established at strategic high points overlooking turnpikes, railroads and shipping lanes.

Today, you can visit 17 of them managed by the National Park Service (NPS). Localities protect some, and some are privately owned.

War in mid-city

On a sweltering July day 160 years ago, a battle erupted in Washington, D.C., and the president watched the opposing armies fight it out.

President Abraham Lincoln rode his horse from his summer cottage to Fort Stevens, two miles north, to observe a battle between Union and Confederate troops.

“Get down, you damn fool!” shouted a young officer named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., when Lincoln came under fire from Confederate sharpshooters. That officer went on to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Lincoln’s excursion to the battlefield made him the only U.S. president ever directly subjected to enemy fire.

Every summer, that historic skirmish is re-enacted with Civil War-era music and lectures at Fort Stevens.

The July 12, 1864 confrontation, which became known as “The Battle That Saved Washington,” could have been devastating.

But three days earlier, Union General Lew Wallace engaged Confederate General Jubal A. Early’s troops at the Battle of Monocacy 35 miles away in Maryland, a tactic that delayed Early and gave Wallace time to get reinforcements.

Early withdrew from Fort Stevens, failing to capture the capital. And so, Fort Stevens became one of the most crucial defenses ringing the city.

Now an NPS site and one of the city’s highest points, visitors to the fort can see an earthen wall, embankment, parapet and trench in the one-block-square park.

Ten minutes away is the Lincoln Cottage, the Gothic Revival house where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln ordered the forts

In 1861, after Confederate forces unexpectedly defeated Union troops at the Battle of Bull Run, only 30 miles west of the city, Lincoln ordered the military to protect the nation’s capital and its 75,000 residents, fearing a Confederate invasion.

The Army Corps of Engineers built field fortifications or earthworks from readily available dirt and wood. No two forts were the same.

Generally, a 12-to-18-foot-thick parapet faced the exposed front. On most, they mounted guns on platforms, created a steep slope down to a dry moat, stored ammunition and gunpowder inside, and placed sharpened, pointed tree branches around the outside.

By the end of 1863, with 23,000 troops, Washington was the most heavily fortified city in the world.

“The Civil War Defenses of Washington protected our capital and saved the nation from disintegration and slavery,” said Gary Thompson, president of the Alliance to Preserve the Civil War Defenses of Washington. “The forts allowed the U.S. Army to train, supply and then launch the campaigns that ultimately defeated the Rebels.

“The few forts and batteries not lost to development are worth preserving to enhance our education and awareness of this critical chapter in American history.”

Here are the surviving Civil War forts in our area:

Rock Creek Park’s Fort DeRussy

Fort DeRussy was built in 1861 on a hill on the west bank of Rock Creek in the city. Along with Forts Kearney and Reno, it was intended to control the country roads between Rockville Pike and Rock Creek Valley.

Shaped like a trapezium, it ultimately had 11 guns and mortars and a 100-pound Parrott. You can still see the parapet of high earth mounds, the dry moat, and powder magazine remnants.

Fort Ward

In Alexandria, a Union-occupied city during the war, the Army Corps of Engineers built Fort Ward in 1861 — a 35-acre installation considered to be a model of military design at the time. It had up to 3,000 soldiers and 36 gun emplacements to guard the Leesburg and Alexandria Turnpike, now Route 7.

Managed today by the city of Alexandria, it is one of the best-preserved of the Defenses of Washington. Around 90 percent of Fort Ward’s earthwork walls still stand, along with a reconstructed bastion and 1865 gate.

A replica officer’s hut offers a glimpse into the soldiers’ lives. A museum houses more than 2,000 artillery objects, maps, drawings and other objects associated with the Civil War.

Potomac River’s Fort Marcy

Fort Marcy was built to protect Chain Bridge, a key river crossing. It had a 338-foot perimeter and 18 guns, a 10-inch mortar and two 24-pounder Coehorn mortars.

The National Park Service property, located in McLean, Virginia, on the Potomac, is open to visitors, who can study its earthwork walls, entrenchments and magazine dugouts.

Arlington’s Fort Scott

Today, youngsters romp and play ball at Arlington’s Fort Scott Park, sitting atop a 200-foot ridge overlooking Crystal City near Reagan National Airport.

During the Civil War, solders there watched the Long Bridge and Washington, D.C., “to exclude the enemy,” wrote Brev. Maj. General J. G. Barnard in 1871. A plaque explains the land’s Civil War history.

Fort Foote

Prior to the ring of forts, Fort Washington — built in 1809 on the Potomac River in today’s Prince George County — guarded against armed vessels approaching Washington.

Military officials decided the city needed a fort more resistant to naval bombardment than Fort Washington, so in 1863 they built Fort Foote with earthen walls 20 feet thick.

Two of its 15-inch, Civil War Rodman smoothbore cannons still stand, seemingly ready to attack Confederate ironclads.

At war’s end, the War Department dismantled or abandoned most of the forts, returned some to pre-war owners, and auctioned off the lumber and other materials.

For more information, visit the Civil War Defenses of Washington, nps.gov/cwdw/index.htm, or the Alliance to Preserve the Civil War Defenses of Washington at apcwdw.com.