Fort Barrancas was designed by General Joseph G. Totten, America's first superstar of military engineers, and built primarily by slave labor. Though vaguely similar in appearance to Fort Macon in North Carolina, Fort Barrancas is unique among American forts of this size in that it was not designed to house a garrison: It is essentially a beefy raised gun platform with an infantry gallery looped around inside its base, surrounded on two sides by counterscarp galleries. The fort has no parade ground, instead being filled with earth so as to be a solid mass.