Behind these glassed-in sun porches sits the last major West Barracks building still awaiting rehabilitation — a 1904 brick hospital that ranked among the most modern in the nation. When spruce-mill injuries and the 1918 flu overwhelmed its wards, tent hospitals covered the lawn, and recovering soldiers crossed to the 1919 Red Cross house next door. Exterior viewing only.
You are standing outside the Post Hospital, a brick Colonial Revival building from nineteen oh four — brick for sanitation, wide verandas for light and fresh air, later glassed in as sun porches. Through the First World War, this was among the most modern military hospitals in the nation. A wartime spruce mill by the river cut lumber for Allied planes, and its accidents, along with the influenza of nineteen eighteen, landed here. At the peak, more than twenty-five hundred patients a month came through a hospital with fewer than four hundred beds; the overflow spilled into tents on this lawn. The smaller building next door is the Red Cross Convalescent House, dedicated in nineteen nineteen, where the men went to heal. Today the hospital stands empty, the last major West Barracks building awaiting restoration, so take it in from the outside. From here, the restored Artillery Barracks is just southeast.