About Renée Coulter
I grew up in Locust Point, ten minutes’ walk from the gate, and I spent five summers working at Fort McHenry as a seasonal park interpreter. This site exists because of the two questions I answered more than any others: where is the flag, and do I have to pay to go in. The short answers are Washington, and mostly no. Everything else here is the long version.
Where I am writing from
Locust Point is the neighbourhood the fort sits in — a peninsula with the harbour on both sides and 2400 East Fort Avenue at the end of it. Growing up here, the fort was not a monument, it was the green bit at the end of the road where people ran and walked dogs and sat on the seawall. That is still what most of the 43 acres is, and it is still free, which is the thing this site keeps repeating because visitors keep arriving without knowing it.
Five summers on the grounds
A seasonal interpreter is the person in the flat hat you ask things. I stood by the wooden fence that marks where the fee starts, and I answered the same handful of questions from May to September, year after year. Here is what I learned from that, in rough order of how often it came up.
- The flag question. A lot of people come to Fort McHenry to see the Star-Spangled Banner and are told, by me, on a hot afternoon, that it is in Washington at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where getting in is free. I have watched that land on people who had just driven a long way. It is the single most useful sentence on this website and it earns nothing. The full answer.
- The fee question. Almost nobody arrives knowing that the fee covers the star fort and outer battery only, and that the visitor center, the film and the rest of the park cost nothing. People would queue to pay for things they could already walk into. What is free.
- The two-hour gap. The grounds open at 7:00 a.m. and the registers that sell star fort entry open at 9:00 a.m. Those two hours are the best part of the day at Fort McHenry and the least busy, and I have never seen them mentioned anywhere.
- The 4:50 p.m. arrival. Last entry to the fort is 4:45 p.m. on weekdays and 5:45 p.m. at weekends, and the fort, visitor center, gift shop and restrooms shut 15 minutes before the park does. Turning people away five minutes late never got easier. Hours and closures.
- The tunnel. Somebody asks about the tunnel every week. It carries I-95 under the harbour, it is run by the Maryland Transportation Authority, a two-axle car pays $3.00 with E-ZPass Maryland, $4.00 cash and $6.00 by video toll, and it has nothing to do with the monument beyond the name. The tunnel, separated out.
Why this site barely sells anything
Because there is nothing to sell. Admission to Fort McHenry is $15 per adult aged 16 and over, valid seven days on the same receipt, free under 16, and the National Park Service sells it at the gate. No booking site has it. What GetYourGuide does have for Baltimore is three activities: a harbour cruise that passes the fort, a helicopter flight that goes over it, and a food walk in Fells Point that has nothing to do with it. I have reviewed all three honestly, including the parts that do not flatter them, and I earn a commission if you book one. That is set out plainly in the affiliate disclosure, along with the fact that the $15 earns me nothing.
What I will not tell you
There are things I was asked constantly and cannot answer to a standard I would put my name to: how many people died in the 1814 bombardment, exactly how long it lasted, whether each cannon on the site is original, what the winter grounds hours are this year. I could guess and the guess would probably read well. Instead those pages say what is verified, say plainly where the gap is, and send you to the Park Service’s own page. A page that admits a gap is worth more than a page that fills it with a plausible number.
If something here is wrong, or has changed since August 2026, tell me — get in touch and I will fix it.