Carlisle Barracks: Second Oldest Post in America
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The military installation sitting just east of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has been in continuous use since seventeen fifty-seven, when British colonial forces built a forward camp here during the French and Indian War. That makes Carlisle Barracks the second-oldest active military post in the United States, a place that has watched nearly every chapter of American military history either pass through or happen on its grounds.
During the Revolution, Continental forces used the site. In the Civil War it became the object of one of the stranger footnotes in the Gettysburg campaign. On the evening of July first, eighteen sixty-three, Confederate cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart arrived at Carlisle with his exhausted horsemen after a long ride around the Union army. He demanded the town's surrender. Union militia under General William F. Smith refused. Stuart briefly shelled the barracks and then set them on fire before withdrawing toward Gettysburg. The skirmish at Carlisle was part of why Stuart arrived at Gettysburg late, missing the first two days of the battle. Whether that delay cost the Confederacy the campaign is one of the more argued questions in Civil War scholarship.
After the war, the barracks became associated with some of American history's most painful chapters. From eighteen seventy-nine to nineteen eighteen, the grounds housed the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. After the school closed, the barracks reverted to military use. In nineteen fifty-one, the Army relocated the United States Army War College here from Washington, establishing Carlisle as the home of the senior service college where generals and admirals spend a year studying strategy and national security.
Today the War College library holds one of the largest military history collections in the world, and the grounds carry the layered weight of more than two and a half centuries of American wars, policies, and consequences.
