The first Fort Adams was designed by Major Louis de Tousard of the United States Army Corps of Engineers as part of the first system of US fortifications.

After some additions in 1809,[4] this fort mounted 17 cannon and was garrisoned during the War of 1812 by Wood's State Corps of Rhode Island militiamen.

The new fort was designed by Brigadier General Simon Bernard, a Frenchman who had served as a military engineer under Napoleon Bonaparte.

Bernard designed the new Fort Adams in the classic style and it became the most complex fortification in the Western Hemisphere.

It included a tenaille and crownwork, a complex outer work on the southern (landward) side, designed to break up and channel an assault force.

From 1825 to 1838 construction was overseen by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Gilbert Totten, the foremost American military engineer of his day.

The fort's garrison was ordered to California and many of the soldiers lost their lives when the steamer SS San Francisco was wrecked in a North Atlantic storm on December 24, 1853.

The flank howitzers were short-barreled guns deployed in casemates in the tenaille and redoubt to protect the fort against a landward assault.

[13] From 1859 to 1863 the fort was in the care of Ordnance Sergeant Mark Wentworth Smith, a Mexican–American War veteran who was wounded at the Battle of Chapultepec.

In September 1861, the academy moved to the Atlantic House Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, and remained there for the rest of the war.

Among the midshipmen assigned to the Naval Academy while it was at Fort Adams was Robley D. Evans who was wounded at Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in 1865, commanded the battleship USS Iowa during the Spanish–American War in 1898, and later commanded the Great White Fleet on the first leg of its epic around-the-world voyage of 1906–1908.

Among Evans' classmates at Fort Adams were future Rear Admiral Charles Sigsbee, who commanded the battleship USS Maine, and future Captain Charles Vernon Gridley, who commanded the protected cruiser Olympia at the Battle of Manila Bay on 1 May 1898.

[11][15] Battery Greene-Edgerton was named for Major General Nathanael Greene of the American Revolutionary War and Lieutenant Colonel Wright P. Edgerton, a professor at the United States Military Academy.

During the war, Fort Adams served as the headquarters for the Coast Defenses of Narragansett Bay, as well as a training center.

[18][19][20] Thornton Wilder, author and playwright whose 1973 novel Theophilus North is set in Newport, served a three-month enlistment in the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams during World War I. Wilder rose to the rank of corporal in the Army.

[11] Some sources state that Battery Talbot's guns were redeployed to Sachuest Point, a few miles from Fort Adams, from 1917 to 1919.

However, U.S. Army records show that these guns came from Fort Strong, Massachusetts, in the Coast Defenses of Boston.

[22] An Anti-Motor Torpedo Boat Battery (AMTB 925), with two 90-millimeter guns on mobile mounts, was also at Fort Adams by December 1943.

Taylor, in the 1970s Fort Adams was cleaned up, opened for tours, and used for the filming of the PBS television miniseries The Scarlet Letter.