History
The hospital was built in 1942, and opened on Washington's Birthday in 1943 to care for the wounded of World War II. It became the largest military hospital in the United States. Eventually, the hospital had well over 3,000 patients and over 100 separate buildings. One feature of the hospital was its design of primarily two story buildings, interconnected by corridors. There were very long ramps leading from one floor to the other, to facilitate movement of wheelchairs and gurneys. The architecture was designed by Matthew Bookler.
The exterior was all red brick. The interior was all wood. It was a maze of corridors, and newly assigned personnel regularly became lost.
The Army planned to shut down V.F.G.H. in 1950, but the Korean War began, and it stayed open. The final closing came in 1975, although it had stopped functioning as a hospital the previous year.
The site is now occupied by the Valley Forge Christian College.
Read more about this topic: Valley Forge General Hospital
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“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)