Chapman Field in the Beginnning

Hi,

I know it has been a long time since my last news letter. But the government is broke and it just would not be right if someone saw a public employee roaming these beautiful grounds taking pictures. So I snuck in on a Saturday to take these. The place where I work is called the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service – Subtropical Horticulture Research Station. Wow! Now you know why the government uses acronyms¹! This one is USDA-ARS-SHRS, which is still a mouthful so the locals call it Chapman Field. It was named after Lt. Victor Chapman (see picture), the first U.S. airman killed in World War 1.

 Lt. Victor Emmanuel Chapman on the right

During World War 1 this station was an Army Air Corp flight training base. This very spot is reported to be the site where the greatest of all World War 1 Flying Ace was trained (see picture).

In the late 1890’s The USDA needed a place to house tropical and subtropical plants it was collecting. They built a small station in downtown Miami but as the collection grew a larger place was needed. In 1923 a bunch of good old boys, never meaning no harm . . . no that’s the Dukes of Hazard. I’m talking about some young talented botanists, who convinced the Army to transfer Chapman Field over to the USDA.  On April 26, 1923 Drs. David Fairchild and Walter Swingle (the two dashing young men on the bottom left and right) opened the U.S. Plant Introduction Garden at Chapman Field (USIG at CF, you can see our acronym grew as the station got bigger).

¹Acronym n. A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging.

  

The Boys

top left to right: Joseph James, Theodore Holm, M.B. Waite, P.H. Dorsett

bottom left to right David Farichild, B.T. Galloway, Walter Tennyson Swingle

This is what the station looked like in 1926. What you can’t tell from this picture is that there are 20 gazillion mosquitoes lurking in the swamp below. At one time the CIA funded a study to train mosquitoes to attack troops who were not drenched in their top secret insect repellant. Insects have a phenomenal sense of smell so it worked great. However, the repellant was top secret so only generals with the highest of all security clearance could use it. The trained mosquitoes were release on April 20, 1923, by the end of the week the Army transferred Chapman Field to the USDA. Their first mandate was to get rid of the killer bugs (or at least that is the story I was told).

To be continued