Wednesday, October 23, 2024, at 7:00 p.m.
West Park Recreation Center, 615 W Park Ave, Oakhurst, NJ 07755
A history of Fort Monmouth, including the innovations and tens of thousands of soldiers that came through the years.
The history of Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, begins in May 1917 when, as part of its wartime mobilization, the Army authorized four training camps for signal troops. One camp, located in central NJ, would eventually be known as “Fort Monmouth,” in honor of the soldiers of the American Revolution who fought and died at the nearby battle of Monmouth.
This camp was located on the site of an old racetrack and luxury hotel, remnants of the famed Gilded Age at the Jersey Shore. Though much of the site was overgrown and infested with poison ivy, it afforded the Army significant advantages: proximity to the port of Hoboken and a train station, good stone roads, and access to water. Corporal Carl L. Whitehurst was among the first men to arrive at Camp Little Silver. He later recalled that the site appeared to be a “jungle of weeds, poison ivy, briars, and underbrush.” The Army Signal Corps carved a camp out of that wilderness, and trained thousands of men for war there. The Signal Corps also built laboratories that worked on pioneering technologies, like air to ground radio, from their very inception. Though the base was supposed to be temporary, it wound up outliving the war. It was for decades known as the “Home of the Signal Corps,” and, until its closure in 2011, was still innovating some of the most significant communications and electronics advances in military history.
The US Army Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM), which left Fort Monmouth in 2011, for Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, can trace its roots to the establishment of the Signal Corps training camp and research and development laboratory at Fort Monmouth in 1917, and Netflix, the site’s next owner, has a powerful legacy to live up to. From celebrity homing pigeons to the radars that detected the incoming Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor to early space communications and night vision technologies, Fort Monmouth, once called the “Army’s House of Magic,” was the birthplace of innovation and technological revolution and the home of a uniquely diverse group of military and civilian heroes and scientists.
Fort Monmouth, the Army’s House of Magic, written by Melissa Ziobro explores Fort Monmouth’s rich history, its wartime mobilization, and the stories of the soldiers who served and the civilians who worked there. Many local residents are retired from their posts at the Fort, including Walter S. McAfee a mathematical physicist and former Monmouth College lecturer whose work helped launch the Space Age. Ms. Ziobro is the curator of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music housed at Monmouth University and she serves as a specialist professor of public history.
She will speak on October 23, 2024, at 7:00 at the West Park Recreation Center (Next to Park Avenue Tennis Center and Ocean Community Pool Complex) on W. Park Avenue, Oakhurst. The presentation is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
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