Few places in New Jersey have a more fascinating past than Camp Evans in Wall.
For the last century, these sprawling acres along the south shore of the Shark River have been a place of historic firsts and countless contributions to the world of advancing technology. Through periods of both private enterprise and military usage, it has changed history, safeguarded our world and led us into the atomic age and beyond.
The original buildings at Camp Evans were built by the American Marconi Company between 1912 and 1914 as part of Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi's "wireless girdle" around the Earth. All of the Marconi stations were seized by the U.S. Navy when the United States entered World War I in April 1917.
During the war, it was from here that communication was maintained between Washington and the European battlefront. At the end of the war, the property was briefly returned to the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, which was acquired by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1919. RCA sold the Wall site in 1924. Marconi himself would soon go on to be a high ranking official in the Grand Council of the Italian Fascist party when dictator Benito Mussolini appointed him President of the Royal Academy of Italy.
From 1925 to 1935, the Belmar Station, as it was then known, was owned by the Monmouth County Pleasure Seeker's Club. While the name sounds harmless enough, the club had close ties to Arthur H. Bell and the Ku Klux Klan. In documents from that period, the land was listed as state headquarters for the Klan and it is believed they envisioned it as a summer retreat for its members. Their plan was to sell parcels of land only to other Klan members, but the combination of a lengthy lawsuit and the onset of the Depression would halt their plans to turn the grounds into a stronghold of racial and religious intolerance.
The U.S. Army purchased the land in November of 1941, just days before America's entrance into World War II, to create a top-secret research facility. Many crucial innovations were researched, prototyped and developed at Evans, perhaps most notably radar, helping to keep the allies one step ahead of the enemy. The atomic bombs that ended the war were detonated by radar fuses developed at Camp Evans.
After the war, the camp would be a landing point for many top German scientists, including rocket specialist Wernher von Braun, as part of Operation Paperclip. This infamous project actively recruited Nazi scientists in an effort to keep them from falling into Soviet hands. Included in this group was Dr. Erich Traub, a Nazi germ warfare specialist who has been called the father of Long Island's notorious Plum Island, long rumored to be the site of more germ warfare research.
Many such scientists of dubious distinction were covertly brought on board at the camp using documents that had been "bleached" to hide Nazi affiliation. They were offered full citizenship and went to work in similar capacities here in the U.S., these once mortal enemies now working alongside American scientists to gain the upper hand in the cold war.
'House of Magic' or 'House of Spies'?
Much Cold War chicanery played out through Camp Evans and it was a vital cog in the battle of espionage between superpowers. It was also the place that cold war paranoia was struck a fatal blow and led to the undoing of the most infamous Communist hunter of all time. On Oct. 20, 1953, notorious Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin brought his cold war hysteria to the Camp Evans. In the wake of the Rosenberg scandal at nearby Fort Monmouth, McCarthy was eager to ferret out the communist spies and sympathizers he was certain could be found lurking within Evans many top-secret research buildings.
McCarthy claimed that the Army's "house of magic" was really a "house of spies." Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in the 1940s while Julius was working at Fort Monmouth as an electrical engineer. The duel execution of the Rosenbergs at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953, was the first capital punishment of civilians for espionage in U.S. history. Documents released by Russia after the Cold War ended showed that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy.
The ensuing witch-hunt would cast a wide net of suspicion over Camp Evans, and many employees were suspended from their jobs based on the flimsiest of connections to communism that could be mustered. None of the close to 50 employees who were investigated would ever face prosecution, although certainly many reputations were indelibly tarnished. Some had their security clearances revoked and were forced to work outside the camp's gates in what became known as the "leper colonies."
It was during that 1953 visit that a power struggle ensued between McCarthy's investigators and camp security personnel, who denied them access to a top-secret facility that monitored atomic test blasts from around the world. While a compromise was eventually reached, some members of the group were still refused access, including attorney Roy Cohn, who vowed to get revenge on the army. The trip to Camp Evans would be the beginning of the end for McCarthy's political career and would lead to sweeping changes in the way in which the House and Senate conduct investigations.
Radioactivity BehindCamp Evans 'Shield'
A number of memorable individuals have worked at Evans over the years including the brilliant and eccentric Dr. Stanley Kronenberg. When he wasn't publishing one of nearly 100 papers on nuclear radiation, being awarded 22 different patents in the field or cementing his reputation as a leading authority on all things nuclear, Kronenberg painted murals of Egyptian hieroglyphics on a wall of his lab and wore a name tag proclaiming him a "mad scientist."
Camp Evans Building 9401 was the Army's Dosimetry Laboratory, a radiation testing facility, from 1952 to 2001. It had one and a half foot thick walls to protect the surrounding area from any radiation being used inside the building during experiments. Known as "the Shield," the building housed a neutron generator, and was Kronenberg's office. The structure also contained what was referred to as the "swimming pool," a 10-foot wide, 20-foot deep welded stainless steel tank filled with water to shield the gamma radiation of its 3500 Curie Co 60 radioactive source.
The laboratories were used for research during the Cold War in helping to create devices for the Army to measure soldiers' exposure to radiation and to test radiation's effects on materials used in military equipment and supplies. In another room of the "shield" called the "vault," Kronenberg painted a mural on one wall in the 1950s of an Egyptian queen's burial scene, as depicted on an ancient papyrus scroll. Photos of the vault have an amber tint because they were shot through a window containing zinc bromide. The window separated the operator of the mechanical arms, who sat at a control panel on one side, from the radioactive source material on the other. The window was constructed like an aquarium filled with the zinc bromide. It was 48 inches thick and cost $44,000.
After more than 50 years of use by the Army Signal Corps, Camp Evans closed its doors for good in 1997. Now part of the National Parks Service, the camp is currently the site of the InfoAge Science/History Learning Center.
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