At Aberdeen the Construction Division built barracks to house 8,000 men, quarters for 230 officers, and all the accessories of convenience and amusement which a community of that size should have.
Guns came to the proving grounds unassembled, so that it was necessary to build an assembly plant. This building is 165 feet wide and 500 feet long and cost $1,000,000. As an adjunct to the assembly plant there is a machine shop which is one of the largest in the United States.
Mention should be made of the 25 miles of standard railway trackage which the Construction Division put down at Aberdeen. This was exclusive of the spur tracks for the heavy guns mounted on railway carriages. These tracks approached the firing range on apparently outlandish curves and at every variety of angle. The guns were fired at these various angles to determine if the recoil would push the carriages from the track or would spread the rails.
The development of aerial bombing and the necessity for testing our own aerial bombs required the construction at Aberdeen of hangars and quarters for an aviation squadron.
In addition to these facilities, the project involved the construction of powder magazines, shell-loading plants, and warehouses. There were built 15 miles of concrete roads and 30 miles of roads of other types. Garage accommodations were provided for 100 trucks and automobiles. The firing ranges required observation towers of various sorts. The observation dugouts had to be of special strength, because certain of the tests at Aberdeen involved the actual bursting of gun barrels, making necessary specially heavy protection for the observers.
Aberdeen is equipped with a complete waterworks system and with a hospital for 250 patients. An interesting laboratory constructed on the grounds is that in which the so-called "dud" shell, or those which fail to explode, are analyzed for their defects. The Aberdeen project was started in December, 1917, and first tests were made within a month. The entire project cost over $30,000,000.
One section of the Aberdeen reservation, about 4,000 acres of it, was set apart for the uses of the gas-warfare organization of the Army and was later known as the Edgewood Arsenal. The progress at Edgewood is indicative of the manner in which chemical warfare increased in importance during our period of belligerency. It was originally estimated that $250,000 would provide a plant at Edgewood sufficient for our chemical-warfare needs. The actual cost of the Edgewood Arsenal at the date of the armistice, so great had been the expansion of chemical warfare, was about $43,000,000. At that time there had been constructed or were in process of construction filling plants that could turn out 120,000 loaded gas shell per day. The equipment at Edgewood includes a cantonment for 10,000 men, some of it of permanent construction. There were built 10 miles of macadam road at Edgewood and 15 miles of railway, in addition to large warehouses and a dock where loaded shell could be freighted upon lighters to deep water.
Another project made necessary by the expansion of chemical warfare was the gas proving grounds at Lakehurst, N. J., the entire project costing $1,500,000. The site of 5,000 acres provided space for two target ranges, each 4 miles long. Extensive laboratories were built at Lakehurst, and the proving ground was operated by a force of 1,500 men. In addition to this there was located at Lakehurst a camp for 3,400 troops in training. All buildings for these facilities were provided by the Construction Division.
In addition to Aberdeen and Lakehurst the Construction Division built a proving ground at Clear Springs, Md., used for testing out 37-millimeter guns; another such institution at Port Clinton, Ohio, for testing 155-millimeter and 240-millimeter howitzers; and others at Scituate, Mass., and Savanna, Ill. The combined cost of these last four projects was $6,507,520.
One important undertaking of the Construction Division was that of providing warehouse depots for ordnance materials. These supplies differ from ordinary Army supplies in the important particular that they must be treated gently and handled with care. A quartermaster storehouse can be of emergency construction type, that is, more or less built of wood, but an ordnance storehouse, since it usually contains high explosives, must be strictly fireproof. In undertaking the creation in record time of a number of ordnance depots the Construction Division faced not only the problem of the type of building required but also the location of these buildings. It was necessary to locate them at deep water in order to avoid frequent handling of the high explosives, yet no depot could be situated in any thickly settled center because of the danger to the civilian population. At most deep-water points on the Atlantic coast which had railway connections the available sites were already occupied. The result was that the ordnance depots had to be built on marshes and meadows, on land which for construction purposes had always been regarded as impossible. Yet they had to be completed in as much of a rush as any buildings which the Army demanded.