After the Civil War, Fort Cass and Fort Whipple remained federal property since they lay within the boundaries of the Arlington Estate. In 1872, the government decided to make Fort Whipple a permanent installation. The Army constructed the first cantonment and established the general layout of the historic post area as it stands today.
The transition of Fort Whipple from a Civil War Fort to a peacetime military installation is not well documented. In fact, the entire period of time the Fort served as a Signal Corps School (1869-1887) is not well documented. In the research process, this lack of documentation placed increased importance on the use of maps and photographs to reconstruct land-use decisions and trends. What is known is that the Army occupied Fort Whipple with various companies of artillery until 1867. In that year, the garrison changed to Company "I", 12th U.S. Infantry under Captain August G. Tassin.6 In 1868 Captain Tassin and Company "I" left Fort Whipple for Fort Russell. During the next two years, it appears that the Army allowed the earthworks of both Fort Cass and Fort Whipple to deteriorate. There is no record of the garrison or command at Fort Whipple until 1870 when it is noted that the Signal Corps had occupied the Fort since March 1869 (Whitehouse 1941).
The Signal Corps and the First "Permanent" Construction
The story of the Signal Corps and its founder, Gen. A. J. Myer, is a fascinating one. It is told with thoroughness and clarity in M. Marshall (1965). For the purposes of this report, only those details necessary to provide context and understanding to the development of Fort Whipple will be addressed.
In 1866, under the direction of President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Stanton appointed Myer to the position of Chief Signal Officer with a brevet commission of "General." This came at the end of a long running dispute between Stanton and Myer dating back to 1863 when Stanton stripped Myer of his Civil War commission. During the Civil War, both Confederate and Union forces put the signaling techniques, developed by Myer before the War, to strategic and tactical advantage and firmly established the importance of signaling to the military. Once he was officially back in charge of signaling activity after the war, Myer developed the Signal Corps to experiment with and to perfect new communications technology for military use.
In the summer of 1868, General Myer established a Signal Training School for a group of officers from the Corps of Engineers. As recounted in D. Marshall (1965), he held class in his Washington, DC office under the following conditions:
He furnished the room with eight tables and chairs, he equipped every table with instruments, battery, and switchboard, and by using great coils of wire to give the effect of distance, he interconnected all the tables in a complex system of eight Morse telegraph stations. That was the first classroom in which the Signal corps gave formal training in wire telegraphy.
Myer soon found the confines of his office suite unsuitable for holding class, and he transferred the school to Fort Greble after a few weeks. Fort Greble, as part of the defensive cordon, was located four miles south of the Mall of the City of Washington (but still within the District of Columbia). It was across the river from and just north of Alexandria, Virginia, and just east of what today is Bolling Air Force Base. At Fort Greble, the school included training for enlisted men. In January 1869, General Myer transferred the school briefly to Lincoln Barracks and then on to Fort Whipple where it remained for the next 17 years (D. Marshall 1965, Scheips 1974).
General Myer selected Fort Whipple for the school because if offered several important advantages over other locations near the Signal Corps office in Washington, DC. Whipple was a much bigger than Greble, providing an opportunity for, as Myer put it, "drills of telegraphic trains and for experiments with electric lines erected and left standing" (Scheips 1974). The telegraphic trains included horse drawn wagons equipped with field telegraph units and wire. The "electric lines" included an experimental field wire-pole line wrapped with forty miles of wire (D. Marshall 1965). The location on Arlington Heights also offered an important advantage for the Signal Corps School. As Myer stated in his 1869 annual report, the post "is well located for the purpose for which it is occupied, on the heights overlooking the valley of the Potomac, whence ranges for near and distant practice may be had from five to thirty miles" (Scheips 1974). The ranges refer to visual signaling of messages with flags (daylight) and lanterns (night) according to the "wigwag" system developed by Myer. Furthermore, the proximity to Washington, DC enabled General Myer to establish direct links to the Signal Corps office across the river. According to D. Marshall (1965), this line was 10 miles long and strung with four different types of wire to evaluate durability and conductivity in comparison to cost.
General Myer was a man of vision, not only in assessing future possibilities of the Signal Corps, but also with respect to the possibilities of the Fort Whipple as a site for the School. By all accounts, the condition of Fort Whipple at the time of the Signal Corps' arrival was poor. A report by the Surgeon General's Office in 1870 noted that the post consisted of two single story frame Officers' quarters, a guardhouse, a frame hospital with a small kitchen, dispensary, and office (U.S. Army 1870). The hospital referenced may be the one shown in the photographs published by Brooks (1974). The post lacked a storeroom and a messroom. There were no bathing facilities or privies, prompting the Surgeon General's Office to rate the sanitary conditions "decidedly bad" (Scheips 1974). On the positive side, the report noted that the post had excellent drainage and "pure, cool water" from a spring. It is unclear where these first buildings stood. Some may have been in the area now known as the "lower post" or perhaps on the area now known as Whipple Field. It does seem that between 1869 and 1871, the Army leveled the earthworks of Fort Whipple in anticipation of new construction.
During the next ten years, the Signal Corps made a series of improvements to the post and established a general layout that is still clear today. Soon after arriving, the Corps built new wooden barracks with a two story central section and single story wings with a total length of 250 feet, but it suffered from poor ventilation (U.S. Army 1870). In 1872, the Army declared Fort Whipple a permanent military post (Federal Writers' Project 1937). In 1875, the Surgeon General's Office reported a number of improvements that resulted in the establishment of a parade ground with buildings on four sides. These included an improved and ventilated barracks for 200 men (possibly a renovation of the 1870 barracks); a twelve-room instructional building that also housed the post headquarters (later referred to as the "observatory") (see Figure 18); a guardhouse; a twelve bed regulation hospital (built in 1871); a "double set" officers' quarters (probably duplexes); two buildings for married soldiers; and a kitchen and mess hall (U.S. Army 1875). Maps and building plans from the 1870s also indicate an ordnance shed (1878); a brick magazine (1878); a "sink" (1877), a stable and its addition (1878); laundresses quarters (1873); and a commissary sergeant's quarters (1873). Many if not all, of the buildings from the 1870s appear to be modified versions of standardized plans from the office of the Quartermaster General (Quartermaster 1903).
A series of photographs taken in 1876 show the results of this early development. Roads were of graded dirt, boards served as sidewalks with young trees planted in the yards of the Officers' quarters and along the roads. Visitors to the post from Washington, DC arrived along a road that follows today's Washington Avenue, turned to the left and crossed a bridge with wooden railings of a rustic design spanning a gully that is now an area of fill between Quarters 1 and Quarters 5 (see Figure 14). The road continued along what is today Grant Avenue. The original four officers' quarters faced the view of Washington with their backs to the parade ground, contrasting with the more common orientation of facing the parade ground (see Figure 13). The road turned right onto what is now Jackson Avenue and proceeded past the instruction and headquarters building on the left, along the south edge of the parade ground, past the guardhouse on the left and barracks on the right, and towards the stables.
Generally, the landscape depicted in these photographs from 1876 is dry and barren. However, a close look at the photographs reveals the beginnings of a Victorian landscape aesthetic. Typical Victorian suburban housing plans show groupings of shrubbery at walk entrances, large trees in side yards and only low flower groupings in front yards. Urns often decorated the lawns. Evidence of this type of planting is found in the 1876 photographs (see Figure 13, and Figure 14). Over the following ten years, as the landscape plantings matured, the yards of the officers' quarters even more fully represented the Victorian aesthetic (see Figure 15).
During the 1870s, the Signal Corps engaged in a number of activities and developed a number of important technologies at Fort Whipple. According to D. Marshall (1965), Gen. Myer, in his effort to involve the Signal Corps in weather forecasting, was "grasping for something that would keep the Signal Corps alive" in the midst of post-war budget cuts. In 1870, a joint resolution of Congress charged the Signal Corps with establishing the country's first weather bureau. By the end of the year, reports from Signal Corps sergeants in twenty-four different cities across the country were being filed at the Signal Corps Office. By 1878, Myer received by telegraph "eight reports a day from each of 224 weather stations" across the country including the Aleutian Islands (D. Marshall 1965). This additional mission expanded the curriculum at the Signal Corps School the size of the garrison. Between 1870 and 1874 the garrison at Fort Whipple grew from 74 to 148 (U.S. Army 1875).
In addition to the continued development of telegraphy, the Signal Corps experimented with telephone technology and the heliograph. According to Scheips (1974), the Corps installed the first Army telephone and established a line between Fort Whipple and Myer's Signal Corps Office in Washington, DC in October 1877, "just 18 months after Alexander Graham Bell had taken out his first patent." By 1878, the Corps installed a 45-mile experimental line at Fort Whipple (Scheips 1974). The heliograph, a signaling device that uses mirrors to direct and flash sunlight and developed in the Anglo-Indian army, came to Whipple in the 1870s. The Signal Corps developed the technology for use in the Southwest, where the Army used it up to World War I (Scheips 1974).
In 1880, the Signal Corps suffered a loss with the death of General Myer. The following year, the War Department renamed Fort Whipple in honor of General Myer. During the following years, the Signal Corps School continued training recruits. According to Scheips (1974) "to be fully qualified as observer-sergeants, enlisted men had to combine preliminary work at Fort Whipple with a `year of duty and study as assistants' at a weather station and then take additional instruction in `higher branches' of meteorology [back] at Fort Whipple." Without the energetic lobbying of General Myer and with increasing budget pressures, congressional and War Department support for the Signal Corps began to fade by the end of the 1880s. In 1886, movements were afoot to change Fort Myer into a cavalry post.
Influence of the Signal Corps School Period on the Landscape of Fort Myer
The main influences of the Signal Corps School on the landscape of Fort Myer can be summarized as follows:
· General Post Layout/Spatial Organization: the construction of the Signal Corps School established the general layout of and relationship among the Grant Avenue Quarters, Whipple Field, and the first parade ground. The brick officers' quarters built along Grant Avenue at the turn of the century to replace the frame quarters replicated the original plan in both location and orientation. Whipple Field and its flagpole, established and left clear as a training area for the Signal Corps, remains clear today. The first, main parade ground established in the 1870s with construction on four sides, remained an open space until very recent times when the Army built a set of tennis courts.
· Circulation Patterns: The original entrance road and basic road system of the post are very much in evidence today. The entrance road is now Washington Avenue. Grant Avenue, Jackson Avenue, Custer Road, and Johnson Lane all date from the Signal Corps School period.
· Victorian Architecture and Landscape Architecture Aesthetic: The original housing construction at Fort Whipple reflected Victorian architectural aesthetics in the ornamentation of buildings like the Commanding Officers' Quarters (see Figure 13) and the rustic bridge (see Figure 14). The plantings and design of the grounds around the officers' quarters reflected Victorian landscape architecture aesthetics. The Army planted shade trees in the yards and along the streets. The yards had grass lawns, shrubs, and in some cases, ornamental garden urns that accentuated the approaches to the quarters (see Figure 15).
· Building #42: The only building surviving from the 1870s and 1880s is building #42, built in 1878. In 1886, an Adjutant General's Office (AGO) inventory listed the building as occupied by the commissary sergeant. It has been completely reconditioned to approximate its original condition and can be seen today by guided tour through the History Office of Fort Myer.
Only two landscape areas identifiable today stem from the Signal Corps School period:
· Site of Grant Avenue Quarters and Whipple Field: site of first officers' quarters; view to Washington, DC important for signal practice; site of entrance to Civil War Fort Whipple (1863).
· First Parade Ground/Officers' Recreation Area: parade ground of the Signal Corps; area now occupied by tennis courts
Figure 13. Commanding Officer's Quarters, 1876 (National Archives and Records Administration, Still Picture Branch, RG-111-SC, Virginia-General, Drawer 45).
Figure 14. Rustic Bridge, Grant Avenue, 1876 (National Archives and Records Administration, Still Picture Branch, RG-111-SC, Virginia-General, Drawer 45).
Figure 15. Victorian landscape aesthetics influenced the landscape design at Fort Myer. Top and middle images are period illustrations showing popular styles from the 1870s (Scott 1870). Bottom image, Commanding Officer's Quarters at Fort Myer, c. 1900, shows the use of similar Victorian design concepts (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division).
Figure 16. Map of Fort Myer, 1888, showing row of five officers' quarters and two of the ten-acre plots of the Arlington Tract (Library of Congress, Map and Geography Reading Room).
Figure 17. Frame officers' quarters on Grant Avenue, c. 1887-1900 (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Lot 11212, LC USZ62-48668).
Figure 18. Plan of Signal Corps Observatory and Instructional Building, 1873 (National Archives and Records Administration, Cartographic and Architectural Branch, RG 77, Miscellaneous Fortifications File).
6 The main gate for Fort Whipple (and later Fort Myer) from the 1870s to the 1940s stood at the base of Washington Avenue at the intersection of Sherman Road and Fenton Circle. The Army named it "Tassin Gate," presumably in honor of Captain August G. Tassin, commander of Fort Whipple prior to its conversion to a Signal Corps School.