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Unusual VA Properties: Did you know . . . ?
VA's building and property inventory is
diverse and includes some interesting odd treasures on VA medical center properties not
related directly to VA history.
The oldest VA owned structure is an old water driven mill, built
about 1735 on the bank of the Susquehanna River in Perry Point, Maryland. Arrowheads
3000 years old reveal much Susquehanna Indian activity on the land. Built a few years
later, the Mansion at Perry Point was the heart of a plantation on land VA later acquired
for a psychiatric hospital. It was constructed from bricks brought as ballast on ships
from England. Title records trace the property back to a land grant from Lord Baltimore.
During the Civil War, the Union Army had a cavalry mule and horse training station there.
The government used the grounds during World War I for a nitrate munitions plant. A
village of small homes for the workers is nestled around the community center, later used
as the first veterans hospital building on the site.
Other distinct treasures include the Chapel at the VA hospital in
Bronx, New York, the only portion remaining from a former Catholic' girls orphanage which VA
converted to hospital use.
Elegant Dewey House at VA's North Chicago, Illinois, hospital
was built by noted Congressman and Treasury under secretary Charles Dewey, who also
standardized the size and design of today's money.
At Lebanon, Pennsylvania, VA hospital, a Pennsylvania Dutch stone
farmhouse and outbuildings remain from its earlier use as a farm.
The Gothic stone Smyth Tower at the Manchester, New Hampshire, VA
Medical Center was the hideaway retreat of former New Hampshire Governor Fredrick Smyth,
who later served on the Board of Managers of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer
Soldiers, a predecessor agency of VA.
Kit Carson Chapel at the VA Medical Center in Fort Lyon, Colorado
was built from the rubble of the fort building in which the famed cowboy died.
Two 1905 buildings remain from a School for the Blind and later Home
for Inebriates at Knoxville, Iowa, VA Medical Center.
VA even maintains the airplane hanger at Hines, Illinois, used by
aviator Charles Lindbergh. Formerly the Checkerboard Airfield, from there, he
inaugurated the air mail postal service from Chicago to St. Louis.
Civil War battles raged in and around Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The VA medical center grounds contain Confederate Breastworks, which are long trenches and
mounds that were dug and piled by soldiers as a means of defense from advancing Union
soldiers.
VA's newest and most recent acquisition from Congress is
Pershing Hall in Paris, France, built in 1882 by the Count of Paris who was the Bourbon
pretender to the French crown. The town home was bought by the American Legion for a
memorial to General John Pershing and the World War I American Expeditionary Forces.
VA's Headquarters Building site across Lafayette Square from
the White House in Washington, D.C. came with a great history. Prior to 1869, the grand
town homes of high government officials and Presidents James Buchanan and Benjamin
Harrison were located there. In 1869, following the razing of some of the homes, the
Arlington Hotel was erected. One of the most celebrated and exclusive hotels in the
country, it catered to the rich, the congressional, and the diplomatic sets. Every
President from Grant to McKinley stayed there awaiting his inauguration. When it was
torn down in 1912 to make way for an even grander hotel project that bankrupted, the site
remained an unsightly mud hole for six years. In 1918, a speculative office building was
built, and the Treasury Department finally bought it for their veterans programs that
eventually became VA.
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