CAMP GRANT AT ROCKFORD, ILL.
This photograph, taken from kites at an elevation of 1,000 feet, shows a typical cantonment, of which sixteen were built to train the National Army in 1917.
The site for Camp Upton, at Yaphank, Long Island, 15,198 acres, was provided for the Government at an annual rental of $1 per acre. San Diego, Calif., gave 8,000 acres at Linda Vista to the Government rent free for five years. This became the location of Camp Kearney for the National Guard. Camp Fremont, another National Guard training center, was pitched on 7,203 acres of ground donated rent free for one year by the city of San Francisco. Louisville gave the site of Camp Zachary Taylor for the National Army rent free for two years. And there were numerous other similar inducements.
In all the National Army cantonments occupied 167,741 acres which the Government obtained at an average annual rental of $3.93 per acre after the second year of occupancy. The National Guard camps covered 78,639 acres, at a rental of $112,042 the second year of occupancy and thereafter.
The clearing of the sites was no mean part of the cantonment job. The site of Camp Upton at Yaphank, Long Island, proved to be covered with underbrush, and when this was cleared off it was discovered that the remains of an old forest were still there, and stumps were thickly scattered over the entire site. These had to be blasted or pulled out before any building operations could proceed. The sites in character ranged from the sandy loam of Camp Devens, in Massachusetts, to the red clay of Virginia and South Carolina; from the farm lands of Michigan to the prairie on which was built Camp Travis, Tex. Some were flat; some rolling; all were different in shape and extent; and the layout of the camp and the arrangement of the buildings in each case had to be adapted to the local conditions by the constructing quartermaster on the job.
To give a picture of a typical cantonment, let us take Camp Grant, at Rockford, Ill., as an illustration. It cost approximately $11,000,000; it could accommodate 45,000 men and 12,000 horses; its buildings numbered 1,600. Water was supplied from six wells drilled 175 feet deep. There were 38 miles of water main, while the reservoir tanks could hold 550,000 gallons. Its electric lighting system entailed the use of 1,450 miles of copper wire, 1,200 poles, and 35,000 incandescent lamps.
During the construction period 50 carloads of building material were unloaded at Camp Grant every day, and an average of 500,000 board feet of lumber was put up every day over a period of weeks. In the Camp Grant schedule we find such items as 50,000,000 feet of lumber, 700 tons of nails, 4,000,000 square feet of roofing, and 3,000,000 square feet of wall board.