The ferry leaves from the shadow of Fort Gaines. You drive your car onto a flat-bottomed boat, and for forty minutes you are in the middle of Mobile Bay, moving between the two forts that have faced each other across the channel for 160 years.
Fort Morgan is ahead of you. The water is the same water Farragut's fleet ran on August 5, 1864, under fire from both forts and through a field of Confederate mines. The battle is over. The crossing still feels like something.
The ferry is operated by the Alabama Department of Transportation — twenty-eight vehicles, forty minutes, year-round except major holidays. On the Fort Morgan side, you're in Baldwin County. Fort Morgan State Historic Site is right at the landing. From there, AL-180 runs south along the peninsula through Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, and Perdido Key to the Alabama-Florida state line, where a roadhouse called the Flora-Bama has been holding down the border since the 1960s.
If you drive the whole length of the Alabama Gulf Coast in a single day — starting at a Civil War fort, crossing the battlefield by ferry, ending at a dive bar on the state line — you've done something worth doing. The ferry is not the fast way to get anywhere. That's the point.