Fort Monroe, 1917

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I visited my friend Libby the other day, and she surprised me by passing on several old photos that she’d bought years ago at a second-hand store. She said she didn’t know what compelled her to buy them, but she couldn’t let them get lost to time. I completely related to that impulse. This is one of those photos. It measures about 7 x 4.5 inches. As you can see, it’s been labeled twice, informing us that this is the Officer’s School at Fort Monroe in Virginia, in December of 1917. I was unfamiliar with Fort Monroe. Though it’s now a national monument, it was a military installation with a long history. What’s not apparent from this photo is that it’s a coastal location, on the Chesapeake Bay. Could the officer’s school have been somewhere inland? December 1917 would certainly have been a fraught time for these young men to be preparing for war, though surely this spot in Virginia was a place of relative peace and calm compared with where they might have ultimately ended up.

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