History
Construction on Battery Potter began in 1890 when a large concrete plant was set up where the power plant now exists today. A team averaging 60 laborers including blacksmiths, stonemasons, engineers, painters and carpenters worked mostly during the warmer months of the year on the battery between 1890 and 1894. Battery Potter was first armed with a 12 inch model 1888 breech loading rifle serial number 11 in 1892 and the gun lift and the weapon performed well after adjustments had been made. Construction continued on the south gun after the north gun had been proven and the work was completed in 1894.
During its service as a gun battery there were a few minor changes involving water proofing and the addition of stop valves for each side of the battery. In 1903 the then "gun lift battery number one" has been named Battery Potter after Joseph H. Potter. Not long afterwards, the battery was considered obsolete. The plan was to replace it with guns and additional batteries using the newer and faster Buffington-Crozier type gun carriage. The new batteries would be on the bay side of Sandy Hook. The new batteries would provide the all round protection that until then only Potter could provide as the new guns only had a 180 degree field of fire.
In 1906 construction started on Battery Arrowsmith, a single battery of three 8 inch guns on Buffington-Crozier mountings facing the bay side of the Hook. The battery had fewer than the recommended number of three 8 and 10 inch batteries on the bay side but its activation was enough to warrant the deactivation of Battery Potter. The guns and the gun lifts were removed in 1906 and primary fire control stations of other gun batteries were built on Battery Potter's terreplein. The rest of Potter's machinery was removed in 1909 and the interior was used mostly for storage. The primary fire control stations were abandoned in the 1920s after the other batteries became obsolete and were deactivated. During World War II, two radar towers were built on Potter's roof for use by the Harbor entrance command post. At the end of World War II, the command post and radar were abandoned.
Read more about this topic: Battery Potter
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)