Excerpt from Scribner's Magazine, Vol. 64: July, 1918

This development is worth reviewing.

Long before 1845 the need of a naval school had been pointed out by more than one Secretary of the Nay, but the obstacles were formidable. To the mind of the older and more "practical" naval officer the notion of a naval school on land was preposterous. "As well teach a duck to swim in a garret, " he said. After this argument had been knocked out by the advent of steam and the consequent demand for officers with some grounding in engineering, came the obstacle of Congress. It would permit a war-vessel to be repaired annually at half the original cost, but it refused, with a canny eye on corn-fed constituencies, to vote a single dollar for a new naval school. Economy ruled the whole world in the long days of pacifism following Napoleon's wars. At last, however, after many attempts had failed - one in 1827 by the heart-breaking margin of one senatorial vote - Congress was circumvented by George Bancroft, who was Secretary of the Navy from 1845 to the fall of 1846. By combining vision with adroitness Bancroft used the means ready to his hand and succeeded where others had failed.

In casting about for ways and wiles Bancroft soon found that there was at Annapolis an abandoned army post, Fort Severn, which the War Department was willing to transfer to the navy. This army post, then, not because it was thought to be the most suitable of all sites, but because it could be had for nothing, became the cradle of the nation's naval school. To those who know the Academy to-day, with its fifty-one buildings, including Bancroft Hall - said to be the largest single barracks in the world - it is interesting to recall the appearance of the old fort. Near the eastward end of the present gymnasium, or Luce Hall, stood in 1845 the main building of the old post, properly speaking a battery. This was a circular structure one hundred feet in diameter with massive stone walls fourteen feet high. The roof was several feet below the top of the wall and was sodded, serving as a platform for the eight guns. There were nine other much smaller buildings, and a large mulberry-tree, and the whole covered a tongue-shaped area of nine acres and three-quarters, enclosed by a red-brick wall nine feet high.

But the site for a school was of no use without money for repairs and the fitting up of classrooms and living quarters. At this point some genius in the Navy Department reminded the Secretary that he had a lump sum of twenty-eight thousand two hundred dollars that he could spend at his discretion for instruction.

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