Dr. Melissa Ziobro, noted historian and specialist professor of public history with Monmouth University will present “The Army’s House of Magic” Wednesday, October 23, at 7:00 at the West Park Recreation Center (Next to Park Avenue Tennis Center and Ocean Community Pool Complex) in Oakhurst, exploring the history of Fort Monmouth, from its creation in 1917 through its present.
Ziobro’s presentation will also include the innovations and stories of some of the tens of thousands of soldiers who came through the base throughout its decades as a military installation. The history of Fort Monmouth begins in May 1917 when, as part of its wartime mobilization, the Army authorized the central New Jersey site as one of four training camps for signal troops.
It was named to honor American Revolution soldiers who fought and died at the battle of Monmouth in Freehold.
The camp is on the site of an old racetrack and luxury hotel, from the Gilded Age in the Jersey Shore era. . 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, including air to ground radio, from their very inception.
Though the base was supposed to be temporary, it wound up outliving the war and was known for decades as the “Home of the Signal Corp. Until its closure in 2011, some of the most significant communications and electronics advances in military history were still created there.
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.
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 was the birthplace of innovation and technological revolution and the home of a uniquely diverse group of military and civilian heroes and scientists.
Ziobro’s “Army’s House of Magic,” explores that and the soldiers and civilians who served there.
The presentation is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
