Schuylkill Arsenal: Lewis and Clark's Supply Depot

Before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took a single step west, Lewis spent weeks in Philadelphia in the spring of eighteen oh three buying everything the Corps of Discovery would need. Surveying instruments, medicines, iron rations, trade goods. Many of those supplies were stored and then shipped from the Schuylkill Arsenal, right here on the Philadelphia waterfront, hauled overland to Pittsburgh, where a keelboat carried them down the Ohio River to the Mississippi.

The Arsenal itself dates to the very start of the eighteen hundreds. Long after Lewis and Clark, it kept supplying American armies, equipping soldiers through the Civil War, the First World War, and the Second World War, until it was finally razed in nineteen sixty-three. A working port that quietly provisioned the most famous expedition in American history.