BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Armed Forces Retirement Home (Old Soldiers Home)

DC -- Armed Forces Retirement Home (Old Soldiers Home):

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Wikipedia Description: Armed Forces Retirement Home
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The U.S. Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH) — formerly the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home, the U.S. Soldiers' Home, and the U.S. Military Asylum — is an independent establishment in the executive branch of the federal government of the United States. It now operates two retirement homes for American military veterans — the historic Soldiers' Home in northeast Washington, D.C. and a home in Gulfport, Mississippi, just west of Keesler Air Force Base.

The U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home:

The Soldiers' Home occupies a campus in N.E. Washington, D.C.. It sits adjacent to two historic cemeteries, Rock Creek Cemetery and United States Soldiers' and Airmen's Home National Cemetery (the forerunner of Arlington National Cemetery).

History:

The Soldiers Home was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1851 following the Mexican-American War. Its purpose was to provide a place of retirement for U.S. servicemen. The project came to fruition largely due to the efforts of Major Robert Anderson, Jefferson Davis, (at that time Secretary of War), and General Winfield Scott. These three men wanted to provide a secure and honorable place for retirement for homeless and disabled war veterans.

Notable buildings:

The Soldiers' Home has had many interesting historic buildings, some of which survive to the present day:

* Anderson Cottage

Built initially in 1843 by the banker George Washington Riggs as a summer cottage for his family, it was a part of the first parcel acquired by the U.S. Military Asylum. Renamed Anderson Cottage for co-founder Major Robert Anderson it housed the first residents of the home. It is now known as President Lincoln's Cottage. The house is grey stucco.

* Scott Building

Begun in 1852 and completed in the 1890s, Scott Building is named for General Winfield Scott. The initial design for the building was in the Norman Gothic style. It housed 100-200 residents. Its castellated clock tower was used as a watch tower during the Civil War, especially during General Jubal Early's raid on nearby Fort Stevens.

* Sherman Building

Built by Barton S. Alexander, the Sherman Building is connected to the Scott Building by a central annex. Its exterior is unfinished white marble.

* Stanley Hall

Built in 1897, this was a recreation center and is now the Home's Chapel.

* Sheridan Building

This building, begun in 1883, was built as a dormitory. It has three stories and is built of red brick.

* Grant Building

Begun in 1911, the Grant Building was built as a barracks, mess hall, and recreation center.

The Gulfport campus:

The Gulfport campus was severely damaged in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. In September 2007, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced the award to Yates Construction of Biloxi, Mississippi of a design-build contract to replace the damaged 13-story building. The contract was for $189 million dollars, with most of the funding being appropriated by Public Law 109-234.

The damaged building was demolished in October 2007. A new building is under construction, with plans to open in 2010.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so. Image quality for my pictures is variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints at varying quality/resolutions. The Great Pandemic Digitizing Project: When I was first setting up my website in August, 2000, I had decided to digitize some of my favorite pre-digital slides and prints. The scans were fairly low resolution but they were good enough. With COVID forcing me to stay indoors, I decided to rescan ALL of my pre-digital images from multiple sources (slides, prints, and negatives) at a much higher resolution and quality setting. (I digitized Dad's slides at the same time). Instead of replacing my original scans, I added the new scans to existing pages, figuring I'd select the best ones later. As a result, multiple versions of images appear on most of these early pages. At some point, I'll take the time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates.
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Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].