Working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, scientists and technicians at Camp Evans researched and developed advanced electronic systems and tools for military and civilian use during much of the 20th century. From 1912 until the 1920s, the site was the home of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America’s receiving station for wireless transatlantic communications. Marconi’s new radio wave technology was used by the U.S. Navy for important communications during World War I. In 1941, the U.S. Army purchased the facility, and the Signal Corps opened a secret research and development facility there, greatly enlarging the property with many additional buildings. During and after the war, Camp Evans scientists made important discoveries in the field of radar, developments that revolutionized modern warfare.

In Project Diana after the war, Camp Evans bounced radio waves off the surface of the moon and read their echo, demonstrating the possibility to communicate beyond the earth’s atmosphere. This achievement showed, in principle, that it would be possible to communicate with spacecraft and with artificial satellites that could observe our planet from space. These capabilities have led to many military applications, but they have also given us weather satellites, for example, by which we can track hurricanes—including Sandy—and have global communications that support the Internet.

Through the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, the Department of Defense decided to close Camp Evans in 1993. Largely because of the dedication of long-time advocate Fred Carl, other volunteers, and the local community, Camp Evans is now the home of the Information Age Learning Center (InfoAge), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of Camp Evans and fostering educational activities related to science and innovation. Over 30 buildings and structures remain on the 27-acre property, including the Project Diana antenna and the only known collection of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Units.

Camp Evans was designated a National Historic Landmark (NHL) on October 16, 2012, to recognize the important role it played in World War II. The Landmark nomination states, “Equipment developed, tested, battle hardened, documented, and upgraded at Camp Evans saw use in all World War II theaters of war and protected American military assets worldwide.”

Camp Evans Project Diana antenna built for
the first experiments in radar astronomy,
1945-46. The antenna transmitted and
received the first radio waves bounced off
the moon.

Camp Evans "H" Complex buildings 9036
and 9037, with Dymaxion Deployment Unit
in foreground, left.

While the Blue and Gray fought no battles on New Jersey soil, Civil War dead from both Union and Confederate armies rest in hallowed ground at Finn's Point National Cemetery along the banks of the Delaware River in Salem County.  During the latter years of the nation's greatest conflict, malnutrition and rampant disease claimed the lives of almost 2,700 Confederate prisoners of war held at nearby Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island (now Delaware's Fort Delaware State Park).  Beginning in 1863, the Federal government began ferrying deceased prisoners for interment in a small parcel set aside at Finn's Point, a 104-acre tract purchased by the U.S. in 1837 to defendthe river from naval attack. Nearly 2,500 Confederates were buried in unmarked graves here, along with 135 Union prison guards who likewise succumbed to disease.

Finn's Point earned designation as a national cemetery in 1875, with a marble monument to the Union dead and a Superintendent's Lodge in the Second Empire style erected on the site soon after. In 1910, the Federal government honored the Confederate veterans buried at the site with an 85-foot granite obelisk and bronze panels listing their names. Also interred are American veterans through World War II, along with 13 deceased German POWs from Fort Dix in the 1940s.

Finn's Point National Cemetery is adjacent to and accessible from Fort Mott
State Park.

Timothy Thomas Fortune (1856-1928) achieved national prominence as a black journalist, newspaper publisher, gifted orator and strident advocate for civil rights in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.  Born into slavery in Marianna, Florida, Fortune acquired an interest in politics and journalism after the Civil War from his father, Reconstruction politician Emanuel Fortune.  Educated in Freedmen's Bureau schools in Florida and briefly at Howard University, Fortune launched a journalistic, editorial and publishing career spanning a quarter-century, principally in New York City.  His newspapers, the New York Globe, New York Freeman, and New York Age, became national forums for social and political discourse on black civil rights issues.  A sometimes uneasy collaborator with his famous contemporary, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), Fortune acquired a reputation as a more militant, activist force, using his fame and influence to organize two early forerunners of the NAACP:  the National Afro-American League (1889) and National Afro-American Council (1898). 

Although remaining a newspaper editor and columnist, Fortune retreated from public life in 1901 due to illness.  In that year he purchased a home in Redbank at 94 West Bergen Place, an eclectic Victorian-era residence constructed in stages from 1860 to 1885, with 20th-century additions.
He resided there until 1915.

T. Thomas Fortune.
Courtesy New York Public Library

T. Thomas Fortune House.
Courtesy Historic American Buildings Survey,
Library of Congress