Fort Macon's Visitor's Center is a model of attractiveness and utility. There's a large gift shop, from which I purchased the required t-shirt, but which also offered many books, DVDs, replica firearms, period candy, jewelry, and all sorts of other nice stuff. There's a conference room and a theater, in which a movie on the fort's history plays every 30 minutes...I generally avoid such movies because, well, I don't really have much of a reason. I just do. I figure I'm going to be researching the fort anyway, and it's more fun to pester the park's personnel with questions than to have those questions preemptively answered by a movie. Paul Branch also has an office in the Visitor's Center, but as it was late in the day I had just missed him.