But although the Division had no large quantity of building supplies to sell, it was charged, after the armistice, with the duty of disposing of the facilities at the 182 construction projects which were terminated. Many of these projects were large ones, those in this category being for the most part training camps for troops. There was a camp shortage in 1918, and the Construction Division was doing everything in its power to overcome it. We were sending men overseas at the rate of 300,000 a month; and, since it was desirable to give every overseas soldier at least six months’ training, that implied camp accommodations for 1,800,000 men in the United States. The actual accommodations provided were for less than 1,370,000 troops. In 1918, after the augmented rate of embarkation became a fact, new training camp projects were consequently inaugurated at frequent intervals. Only a few days before the armistice the Construction Division began the construction of an enormous new camp which was to specialize in the training of infantry. All the national guard camps (sixteen of them) and most of the special-purpose camps, whether completely built or not, were condemned after the armistice for salvage. Most of these were veritable cities, some of them large enough to accommodate 40,000 men each, comfortably—with the adverb accented, for the comfort was based on such substantial (and costly) installations as water and sanitation systems, electric lighting, pavements, sidewalks, and even stores, theatres, and gymnasiums. It was the task of the Construction Division to dispose of these cities to such members of the public as cared to buy.
A city, however, is something more than an accumulation of buildings and other tangible facilities. Quite as much as upon foundations of rock, a city rests upon logic—the logic of its location. Naturally the Government built its camps upon cheap land, therefore upon land not in demand by the population, therefore upon land not so located as to make it a logical place for a city. And so, although it was thought at first that perhaps some of these camps might prove to be the nuclei of permanent civilian communities, that notion soon had to be abandoned for the reason that few civilian movements arose to occupy permanently the former war buildings. An attempt was made, and still is being made, to use the former Nitro Powder Plant as a permanent civilian industrial city, and one or two training camps in the South have been held together by their purchasers with the idea of establishing communities on their sites. The others, however, in which the Government had sunk hundreds of millions of dollars, were sold out to the wreckers, who bought them for the sake of salvaging the building materials.
Now, there is nothing quite so second-hand as second-hand building materials. Boards are full of nail holes and sometimes covered with faded paint or disfiguring marks. Bricks are soiled, chipped, and worn, and conglomerated with stonelike mortar. Hardware and metallic fixtures are corroded and rusty. Such materials are not only wreckage and junk, but not even valuable junk. The chief cost in the construction of a training camp was the labor which laid the brick, installed the underground piping, smoothed, squared, and nailed up the lumber, and soldered the joints in the plumbing. All that labor value was lost when camps were salvaged for their materials.
Yet this was not the only loss which the Government was forced to sustain. Practically all the camps were originally located on leased ground; and this fact implied that in razing the camps the Government was bound to restore the land to its original condition, or, in lieu of that, to pay to the owners the costs of restoration. These questions of property damage greatly complicated the demobilization of the training camps, because the amounts of damage were so hard to ascertain. Concrete roads had been laid across what were originally pastures; fertile corn lands were crisscrossed with clay ridges thrown up above the water and sewer trenches. On the other hand, some of the camp improvements had drained former swamps and reclaimed them for cultivation, and such benefits would offset damages in other places. It was out of the question for the Government to attempt to settle these thousands of cases individually, because of the time it would take; and therefore it was stipulated that the purchasers of the camps must assume all liabilities for property damage and hold the Government harmless from claims that might later be pressed in the Court of Claims. Naturally the purchasers made allowances for these damages in their bids, and wide allowances, too, since the extent of the damages was largely conjecture. This consideration further depressed the prices paid by the purchasers.
The result was that the salvage of abandoned army camps brought back to the Government only a small fraction of the money put into them. Actually in scores of instances it would have been cheaper for the Government to abandon the improvements to the landowners in return for quit-claims for the property damage. Public policy, however, prohibited such a short-cut method. Some of the leased sites had been donated to the Government before the armistice at the nominal rental of $1.00 a year or some other slight sum; but afterwards the chambers of commerce and other civic agencies which had made these concessions, for the sake of securing camps near their communities, refused to renew the arrangements, and the War Department was forced to pay regular rentals. Here was a consideration to force the sale of the camps on any terms possible. The chief lesson learned from the war construction enterprise was that the Government should buy and not lease a site when the value of the improvements is to exceed the value of the site itself. Only by holding such property for permanent use or gradual sale can the Government get value received for its investment.
In general, the salvage recovery from camps and other installations sold after the armistice amounted to about 15 per cent of the money invested in the original building materials. All labor values were lost. All wastage of materials in construction and demolition was loss. Many materials such as cement and concrete, road material, roofing, wood-stave piping, sewer piping, and so on, were a complete loss. The attention of the reader is invited to some typical shrinkages in value.
| Project | Original Cost | Salvage Recovery |
| Camp Beauregard | $4,300,000 | $43,000 |
| Camp Bowie | 3,400,000 | 110,000 |
| Camp Hancock | 6,000,000 | 75,000 |
| Camp Logan | 3,300,000 | 137,000 |
| Camp Wadsworth | 4,000,000 | 95,000 |
| Camp Wheeler | 3,200,000 | 144,000 |
Note, however, that in disposing of these camps, the Government retained practically all the storage and hospital facilities.
During the year following the armistice the Construction Division disposed of fourteen national guard camps, three embarkation camps, sixteen special and regular training camps, four flying fields, four hospitals, and many small groups of buildings. For these the Government received about $4,215,000. In addition, parts of many other camps were sold; also construction materials of practically every sort.
The most spectacular accomplishment of the Construction Division before the armistice was the building of the cantonments, the primary training camps which housed the soldiers summoned into the military service by the Selective Service Law. These were much more substantial installations than the national guard camps, the salvaging of six of which was noted in the tabular statement above. The national guard camps provided only tentage for the shelter of troops, whereas the cantonments housed their inhabitants in stanch wooden barrack buildings. A cantonment cost from two to three times as much as a national guard camp. Yet, on three months’ notice, at the beginning of which not even the sites had yet been selected and acquired, the Construction Division prepared sixteen cantonments ready to receive the first inductives called to the colors.