VA manages more than 1,700 historic properties, but none older than the Grist Mill and Mansion House on the campus of the Perry Point VA Medical Center in Maryland. The two were built sometime around 1750 when Perry Point was a prosperous farm on a peninsula where the Susquehanna River meets the Chesapeake Bay. During the War of 1812, the property survived the British amphibious raids on the upper Chesapeake intact, although the town of Havre de Grace across the river was burned to the ground. In the late 1840s, the site gained in importance as a transportation hub when the owner of the estate, John Stump II, allowed the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad to lay track across his land. The construction of the bridge spanning the Susquehanna in 1866 completed the direct rail connection between Philadelphia and Baltimore.
With the onset of the Civil War, the Stump family permitted the Union Army to take temporary possession of the property and use it as a cavalry training station. The government came calling again, this time permanently, after the United States entered World War I in 1917. Perry Point’s strategic location astride the railroad at the mouth of the Susquehanna River attracted the interest of government officials who were looking for a location to establish an ammonium nitrate plant, a critical ingredient for the manufacture of high explosives. The Stump family agreed to sell almost a third of the 1,800-estate, the Grist Mill and Mansion House included, to the government for $150,000.
Perry Point’s time as a munitions site ended with the armistice in November 1918. A few months later, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) took over the property and began converting buildings in the residential community established for workers at the plant into a hospital for the treatment of war Veterans with neuropsychiatric conditions. In 1922, the Veterans’ Bureau assumed responsibility for Perry Point as well as all other PHS medical facilities serving Veterans. Generous appropriations from Congress funded the rapid expansion of the Perry Point campus in the mid-1920s. In addition to five patient wards constructed in 1921-22, Perry Point added one building for diagnostic services, two for continued treatment, and a fourth devoted to Veterans with tuberculosis. Capping off the new construction were a recreation building equipped with a gymnasium and pool, and a separate dining hall and kitchen capable of feeding up to 1,000 patients at a time.
The intervening years have seen more growth at Perry Point. The medical center returned to its post-WWI roots as a neuropsychiatric hospital with the construction of extensive inpatient and outpatient facilities for Veterans with mental health care needs in the early 2000s. The complex now counts over 85 buildings spread across almost 400 acres. For all of the dramatic changes that have taken place at Perry Point, however, the Grist Mill and Mansion House remain fixtures on the property, carefully preserved by VA to maintain their historical appearance. The Mansion House is closed to the public, but visitors can tour the Grist Mill, which has been turned into a small museum.
For more on the Perry Point medical center and its history, check out the video below by the Veterans Health Administration.
By Charles Rutledge
Virtual Student Federal Service Intern, Office of Construction & Facilities Management
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History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 86: The Roll of Honor
“The following pages are devoted to the memory of those heroes who have given up their lives upon the altar of their country, in defense of the American Union.”
So opened the preface to the first volume of the Roll of Honor, a compendium of over 300,000 Federal soldiers who died during the Civil War and were interred in national and other cemeteries. The genesis of this 27-volume collection published between 1865 and 1871 can be traced to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs and the department he oversaw for a remarkable 21 years from 1861 to 1882.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 85: Congressman Claypool’s “$1 Per Day Pension” Ribbon
Founded in 1866 as fraternal organization for Union Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) embraced a new mission in the 1880s: political activism. The GAR formed a pension committee in 1881 for the express purpose of lobbying Congress for more generous pension benefits.
An artifact from the political wrangling over pensions is now part of the permanent collection of the National VA History Center in Dayton, Ohio. The item is a small pension ribbon displaying the message: “I endorse the $1 per day pension as recommended by the Departments of Ohio and Indiana G.A.R.” The button attached to the ribbon features two American flags and the phrase “saved by the boys of ’61-65.” The back of the ribbon bears the signature of Horatio C. Claypool, a Democratic judge who ran for the seat in Ohio’s eleventh Congressional district in the 1910 mid-term elections.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 84: Gettysburg Address Tablet
President Abraham Lincoln is one of the most revered figures in American history. Rankings of U.S. presidents routinely place him at or near the top of the list. Lincoln is also held in high esteem at VA. His stirring call during his second inaugural address in 1865 to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan” embodies the nation’s promise to all who wear the uniform, a promise VA and its predecessor administrations have kept ever since the Civil War.
Ever since Lincoln first uttered those memorable words in November 1863, the Gettysburg Address has been linked to our national cemeteries. In 1908, Congress approved a plan to produce a standard Gettysburg Address tablet to be installed in all national cemeteries in time for the centennial of President Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1909.
