Fort Whipple: Frontier Garrison to Veterans' Home

The military post that stands northeast of downtown Prescott has had more lives than almost any military installation in the Southwest. Fort Whipple was first established on the twenty-third of December, eighteen sixty-three, at a location called Del Rio Springs, and was relocated the following spring to a higher site on Granite Creek, near where Governor Goodwin was platting the new territorial capital. The fort took its name from Amiel Weeks Whipple, a Union Army general and railroad surveyor who had mapped a route across northern Arizona in the eighteen fifties and who died of wounds received at the Battle of Chancellorsville on the seventh of May, eighteen sixty-three, just months before the fort that would carry his name was established.

For more than two decades, Fort Whipple served as the central military headquarters for the campaigns against the Yavapai and Apache peoples of central Arizona, including during the years when General George Crook commanded operations from eighteen seventy to eighteen seventy-six and again later. After the Apache Wars wound down, the fort was declared obsolete in nineteen thirteen, then reactivated in nineteen eighteen as a military hospital for returning veterans of the First World War. It evolved over the following decades into a Veterans Affairs medical facility and continues to operate as one today.

In nineteen ninety-nine, the Fort Whipple Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The original buildings that watched the Apache Wars being planned are still there, repurposed for healing rather than conquest.