Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report

Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report - 1996

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EVALUATION OF SELECTED CULTURAL RESOURCES
AT FORT MONMOUTH, NEW JERSEY:
CONTEXT FOR COLD WAR ERA,
REVISION OF HISTORIC PROPERTIES DOCUMENTATION,
AND SURVEY OF EVANS AREA
AND SECTIONS OF CAMP CHARLES WOOD
by
Mary Beth Reed
Mark Swanson
NEW SOUTH ASSOCIATES
Stone Mountain, Georgia
Subcontractor for Geo-Marine, Inc.
and
Rebecca Procter
Marsha Prior

June 1996

MISCELLANEOUS REPORT OF INVESTIGATIONS
NUMBER 125
Geo-Marine, Inc.
550 East Fifteenth Street
Plano, Texas evans logo

for
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Fort Worth District
819 Taylor Street
Fort Worth, Texas

The Camp Evans Subinstallation

Acquired in 1941, Camp Evans came into the Fort Monmouth complex with its own unique history in radio development. Previously, Camp Evans had been the site of the American headquarters for the Marconi Company, which pioneered much of the early work in radio. In 1913, the Marconi Company purchased land within Wall Township to serve as the headquarters for its American radio communications company, identified as the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (Klein et al. 1984:2.20; Zahl 1970b).

The Evans area served as the site of receiver equipment for commercial transatlantic radio communication, which, in 1913, was only a few years old. The very first transatlantic message had been sent by Marconi in 1901, and Marconi’s first transatlantic radio tower had been set up at Twin Lights in 1907 (Zahl 1970a). At the Wall Township location, Marconi improved on his Twin Lights arrangement by setting up some 30 radio towers. Some of these towers were said to have been over 300 feet tall (Zahl 1970b). Only one remains today; blown down on Evans in 1974, it was relocated to an adjacent property belonging to Wall Township (Figure 3).

Still extant are the main Marconi building, later known as the Marconi Hotel (Building 9001), the bungalows across the street from the main building (Buildings 9002 and 9003), the Operations Building (Building 9004), and Buildings 9006 and 9007. The main Marconi building, a three-story brick structure, was designed in June of 1913 by J. G. White Engineering Corporation of New York. Erected in early 1914, it is now the administrative center of the Evans area. The operations building, long abandoned, was the receiving station for wireless communications with Europe (Figure 4). It was probably here, in 1914, that Marconi employees like David Sarnoff and Edward Armstrong perfected Armstrong’s “regenerative circuit,” which greatly increased the capability of radio reception (Zahl 1970b). Armstrong would later go on to develop FM radio, while Sarnoff would found the Radio Corporation of American (RCA) (Buchanan and Johnson 1984:79; Graham 1986; Wintemberg ca. 1980).

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the federal government took over the Marconi operation in Wall Township. After the war, the government urged a consortium of American companies to buy the facility. Elements of General Electric, Westinghouse, and AT&T coalesced in December of 1919 to form RCA, with David Sarnoff as president (Buchanan and Johnson 1984:79; Zahl 1970b). RCA owned the Wall Township facility until 1924, when operations were moved to more modern accommodations (Wintemberg ca. 1980).

By the late 1920s, the main Marconi building had become the home of the New Jersey chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), whose “grand wizard” was Hiram K. Evans. As a result of this association, the Marconi site became known as the “Evans Encampment” (Zahl 1970b). In 1937, the property passed to a Reverend Percy Crawford, who established an interdenominational institution on the site called King’s College (Zahl 1970b). The school had 100 students enrolled when the government acquired the land in 1941 (Buchanan and Johnson 1984:79). At that time, the site was designated Camp Evans, in honor of World War I Signal Corps officer Col. Paul Wesley Evans. As the Army has been careful to point out, Camp Evans was not named after Hiram K. Evans of the KKK (Zahl 1970b).

Figure 3. Original Marconi radio tower during re-installation by Wall Township on township property located on Marconi Road, ca. 1974 (Courtesy, CECOM Historical Research Collection, Fort Monmouth).

Figure 4. Marconi receiving station, Evans Area (photograph believed to have been taken ca. 1910s) (Courtesy, CECOM Historical Research Collection, Fort Monmouth).

When the Army bought King’s College in November of 1941, it inherited six of the original Marconi buildings. These included the main Marconi building, the two bungalows, the operations building, and what are now designated Buildings 9006 and 9007. Through the architectural firm of John T. Rowland, the Army made alterations to the latter two buildings, and quickly began to add new buildings to the area, planned as the home of all Army radar facilities after the closure of facilities at Sandy Hook.

The new facilities at Evans were named “Signal Corps Radar Laboratory,” until an official in Washington pointed out that “radar” was still a classified word. In March of 1942, the name was quickly changed to Camp Evans Signal Laboratory. It was finally renamed the Evans Signal Laboratory in April of 1945 (Buchanan and Johnson 1984:79-81; Zahl 1970b). Despite the name changes, Camp Evans remained the nerve center of the Army’s wartime radar research and development, using and coordinating the work of private contractors like Lincoln Laboratories in Massachusetts and Westinghouse in Maryland.

With the exception of the Marconi buildings constructed in 1914, most other construction dates to the early years of World War II, when Camp Evans was first established. Radio jamming and deception work went on in the Marconi main building under the aegis of the “Countermeasures Section,” later known as the Electronic Warfare Laboratory (EWL; EWL ca. 1981). Immediately west of the hotel were four newly constructed buildings laid out like two large “H’s” (Buildings 9010, 9011, 9036, and 9037).

Samuel Stine, a veteran employee at Fort Monmouth, remembers that when he first came to Fort Monmouth in 1943 as a branch chief at Camp Charles Wood, at least one of the Evans “H’s” (Buildings 9036 and 9037) was set up as an assembly line for radar set production. This work was done by enlisted personnel, who were specifically trained in the manufacture of radar. One of the buildings, believed to be 9036, was set up to produce smaller radar sets, probably the SCR-268, while 9037 is thought to have produced the larger units, SCR-270 and SCR-271. All of these sets had bedspring-type antennas. The finished radar sets left Buildings 9036 and 9037 at the south end, where they were mounted on trailers and other vehicles for further testing, storage, and transportation. The materials used in this assembly line production were stored in the brick buildings now identified as 9040, 9041, and 9042, located some 600 feet to the west. Building 9039, immediately south of the storage buildings, served as the contracting office for the radar set materials (Sam Stine, personal communication 1995).

In addition to these main buildings, there were a number of auxiliary structures constructed throughout the camp. Foremost of these were the cubical buildings that housed the radar sets and antennas after they had been mounted. Because the mounted radars did not allow room for interior roof supports, these buildings were augmented by wooden flying buttresses (Figure 5). These unusual buildings were scattered around Evans to minimize the impact of potential enemy bombing or sabotage (Zahl 1970b).

Just as unusual were the “Dymaxion Deployment Units” (DDUs) (Figure 6). The DDU was designed by American engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller and produced by the Butler Manufacturing Company, a firm that normally made grainbins. These corrugated sheet metal structures were often attached to the radar antenna shelters where they played a role in the experiments that had to be conducted on the radar sets. Today, the remaining DDUs at Evans are used for storage (Dr. Richard Bingham, personal communication 1995).

Created in 1940-41 and filed for patent in March of 1941, DDUs were first designed for British military use. Used by the American military after Pearl Harbor, they were loosely based on the construction principles first publicized by Fuller’s “Dymaxion house” in 1927. “Dymaxion” was a word coined by Fuller to express his principle of maximum function for minimum effort. The dymaxion house, based on this principle, was a pre-fabricated circular construction supported by a single central mast (Buckminster Fuller Institute 1995; Klotz 1988; Roth 1979).
Figure 5. Elevations of radar antenna shelters (Source: “Special Antenna Covers,” Master Planning and Real Property Branch, Directorate of Public Works, Fort Monmouth).
Figure 6. Dymaxion Deployment Units (Source: R. Buckminster Fuller Institute, Santa Barbara, California).
The DDUs had circular walls and a unique domed metal roof, with a ventilator at the central apex. This design had the specific purpose of creating a warm-air thermal outside the building, together with a corresponding cool air draft pulled groundward in the middle. The ventilator served to pull this downward draft of cooler air into the DDU. This natural air-conditioning was just one of the unique features of Fuller’s DDUs (Buckminster Fuller Institute 1995).

All of these buildings at Camp Evans were constructed in either 1942 or 1943, when radar production was at its height. There was very little new construction at Evans in the years that followed, and most of that was refurbishing of World War II buildings. For this reason, the layout of Camp Evans at the height of World War II was still accurately portrayed in maps that date from 1949 and 1951 (Figures 7 and 8).

Sometime in either 1944 or 1945, but definitely before the war ended, Camp Evans was converted from a radar manufacturing site to a laboratory and research facility. Radar manufacturing was turned over to commercial enterprises after the government found that the newer radars were too expensive to build at Evans. To replace the manufacturing functions, additional research laboratories were set up at that time. A meteorological lab was established in Building 9039; this was where Sam Stine had his office in the years that followed. Radio direction finding was placed in Building 9044. Dr. Zahl conducted his vacuum tube research for magnetron-type radars in Buildings 9036 and 9037, which were also the site for new materials research (Sam Stine, personal communication 1995).

This work on new materials quickly spilled over into an adjacent nest of buildings: 9025, 9021, 9058, 9088, and 9175. Much of the initial research into semi-conductor materials, like germanium later used in the first transistors, was performed in this small group of buildings. In the 1950s, about the time silicon became more important, this work was transferred to the Hexagon. More prosaic, perhaps, but just as important were the shops set up in Building 9011; the west side became the carpentershop for all of Monmouth, while the east side was turned into an outstanding machine shop (Sam Stine, personal communication 1995).

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