Carlisle Barracks: Two and a Half Centuries of American Arms
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Carlisle Barracks holds a distinction rare among American military posts: it has been in continuous operation since seventeen fifty-seven, making it one of the oldest military installations in the United States. The British Army established a garrison here during the French and Indian War, using Carlisle as the staging point for campaigns into the Pennsylvania interior. It passed into American hands after the Revolution, and it has never left them.
The barracks saw early use as an arsenal and ordnance depot. In December of seventeen seventy-six, the Continental Congress authorized establishing a military supply center here. In seventeen ninety-four, George Washington himself rode to Carlisle to review the militia troops assembling to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, one of the few times a sitting president personally led forces into the field.
Through the nineteenth century the barracks served as a cavalry training post. J.E.B. Stuart, who would become the most famous Confederate cavalry commander of the Civil War, was stationed here as a young officer before the war. George McClellan passed through as well. When the Civil War came, Confederate cavalry under General Robert Rodes and later Stuart returned, not as students but as invaders. In July of eighteen sixty-three, during the Gettysburg campaign, Stuart's cavalry shelled and partially burned the barracks before receiving word that the main battle had opened to the southwest.
In nineteen oh one, the Army established the War College, which moved to Carlisle Barracks in nineteen fifty-one and has been here ever since. The Army War College is the senior educational institution of the United States Army, the place where colonels and lieutenant colonels come to study strategy, international security, and the limits of military power. It occupies a five hundred acre campus that has hosted American soldiers across more than two and a half centuries of the nation's wars.
The grounds today also include the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, whose outdoor Heritage Trail lets visitors walk through reconstructed Civil War cabins, a World War One trench system, a Vietnam firebase, and other full-scale environments spanning the full arc of American military history.
