 was military land. In the summer of 1917, army troops came to Gettysburg and trained on the field that was once the site of Pickett’s Charge. Simply called Camp U.S. Troops Gettysburg, the camp was not equipped to handle cold weather, so it was evacuated at winter’s onset. It reopened in March of 1918 and was renamed Camp Colt, after Samuel Colt, a weapons manufacturer; 27-year-old Capt. Dwight. D. Eisenhower was placed at the helm.
Hundreds of tents filled the 192-acre area, and more than 90 wooden structures were erected, including a hospital. “The main encampments were on both sides of the Emmitsburg Road, starting at the High Water Mark and running out to Sickles’ [Brigade] monument,” a veteran of Camp Colt, Richard Mather Marshall of Pittsburgh, says in an article published 40 years later. “The fields on both sides were used as drill grounds and our infantry training took us all over the Battlefield.”
Today, the Eisenhower Tree, planted along Emmitsburg Road in 1954 by veterans of Camp Colt with a bronze plaque beneath, and a historic sign across the street (pictured above) stand as the only testaments that Camp Colt existed. Other than that, there are small exhibits at the Eisenhower National Historic Site and the National Soldier Factory store at 11 Steinwehr Ave.
The men who made up the Tank Corps, or “Tankers,” as they called themselves, came and went by train at the Gettysburg station. When they left, they were bound for Baltimore and, ultimately, France. Ironically, there were only three tanks here. The first one didn’t arrive for three months, so the men mostly trained on trucks. According to Eisenhower, the soldiers practiced shooting machine guns at Big Round Top. There is no record as to whether they cleared visitors from the battlefield before doing so, but historians agree they probably did.
Patriotic fever and dollar signs struck the citizens of Gettysburg; they wanted the troops here, says Weaver. Thousands of soldiers meant good business, but it also meant drunkenness, rowdiness, and women of ill repute coming to town. In a letter dated Dec. 24, 1918, Thomas H. Scott, lieutenant colonel of the Medical Corps. and chief camp doctor, says men were treated for venereal disease including 404 cases of gonorrhea, and 114 prostitutes were arrested and tried.
Additionally, when 110 soldiers came in from Camp Devens, Mass., they brought Spanish influenza with them. The highly contagious disease spread in camp and in town. A nurse from Chambersburg, Lydia Miller, cared for the sick at the camp hospital, only to return home and die of influenza on Oct. 20, 1918. Pvt. Boyd F. Shriver died on Oct. 4, 1918, but wrote to his family a week before, pleading for medicine because he was not getting what he needed. In a letter to the acting surgeon general, Sen. Howard J. Sutherland called for an investigation into the influenza situation, using the words of Shriver’s bereaved half brother, “He was spitting blood then had pneumonia and they let him die like a dog.”
The worst of the epidemic lasted nearly two months, mid-September through late October, and the death toll varies by source, says Weaver, but in “at ease,” Eisenhower puts the number at 175. The scene was reminiscent of what happened 55 years prior, when places in town become makeshift hospitals. A school, St. Francis Xavier Hall, was one of them, and “every church was utilized to accommodate the overflow of dislocated family members,” says Eisenhower’s granddaughter Susan Eisenhower in her 1996 book, “Mrs. Ike.”
Dwight Eisenhower writes, “There were no coffins. We had no place to put the bodies except in a storage tent until they could gradually be taken care of more suitably.”
“Treat ‘Em Rough”
It wasn’t all bad, though. The camp published a twice-monthly magazine for and by the men called Treat ‘Em Rough. A Tankers’ Club was opened at 37 W. Middle St., complete with pool tables and a lounge and smoking room. The building still exists, and there is a historic sign out front. Pvt. Selmer Swanson of Minneapolis, Minn., who was 16 when he enlisted in 1917, writ