Beyond the Gray

It’s late February at West Point. Cadets trudge to morning formation in Central Area, surrounded by looming gray granite barracks. They trudge to class amidst cold gray snow to academic buildings of gray. They trudge to Arvin Gymnasium under a gray and gloomy sky that threatens a cold wind and more snow. They sit for meals within more gray walls and surrounded by the rest of the Corps in gray uniforms. It is no surprise that Gloom Period is a time all graduates remember—and not with fondness.

By Jenn Voigtschild

Thankfully, just as that wet wool smell becomes unbearable, the snow melts, ice chunks float down the river from up north, and tiny blossoms appear. The Hudson Highlands are again getting ready to welcome tens of thousands of sightseers for the rest of the year. Although many cadets continue to trudge between formations, the cadet mess, academic buildings and athletic facilities, graduates and visitors look about the place that is West Point and see the majesty that is beyond the gray walls.

They go out to Trophy Point and look north up the mighty Hudson River and witness imposing Storm King Mountain—perhaps even lingering for a West Point Band concert on a Saturday night or to watch wedding photos being taken. Visitors quietly and reflectively walk the manicured paths and green rows of the West Point Cemetery, remembering their comrades, friends, mentors, and American heroes. Some graduates and visitors even drive up Stony Lonesome hill and hike to Redoubt 4 to get a panoramic view from Thayer Gate to Washington Gate, marveling at the trees, hills, buildings and scenery below. From these different vantage points and perspectives, the permanence and solidity of the location of the nation’s premier leadership and military academy seem positioned in just the right place for its mission to inspire cadets to prepare them for a career of professional excellence and service to the nation.

General George Washington, though never having traveled through the colony of New York before he made his way from Philadelphia to Boston in 1775 to take command of the nascent revolutionary army at Bunker Hill, had a keen eye for terrain and designated the Hudson Highlands area north of New York City as the “key of America.” Earlier in his life he had been a noted surveyor, completing almost 200 surveys before the beginning of his military career. The bas-relief on the front of Washington Hall correctly depicts surveying instruments as a significant element of Washington’s skills and identity. The “S”-shaped curve of the Hudson River, steep banks, narrow width, and rocky terrain made the east side of the river, with the sloping Martelaer’s Rock, a natural area to begin the defense of the Hudson. As more experienced engineers enhanced the West Point fortifications after battles to the south, the west side of the river was occupied and fortified with an interlocking system of redoubts and forts to be ready for a British attack from any direction. The land on the west side of the river belonged to seasonal resident Stephen Moore, and for a time in 1779 the commander of the Continental Army made his headquarters in Moore’s house, further embedding the importance and beauty of the area in Washington’s viewpoint. Even in 1782, soldiers would stop to enjoy the majesty and scenery of the Hudson Highlands. Sergeant Joseph Plumb Martin,

“Placed in the same stony cradle which had provided security to the infant United States, the tiny school flourished. Rocked gently by ghosts of Revolutionary soldiers, soothed by the softly rolling waves of the grand river, watched over by towering mountains of granite, it developed into the finest military academy the world has known.”

— LTG (R) Dave R. Palmer ’56, 53rd USMA Superintendent, in The River and The Rock: The History of Fortress West Point, 1775-1783

Engraving of West Point by John Hill, ca. 1821. garrisoned at Fort Constitution, went foraging for nuts on the west side of the river one day and decided to climb Butter Hill (part of Storm King Mountain). “I took it into my head to leave my associates and climb this mountain, where I expected to have a prospect of the country around me that would compensate me for all my trouble in climbing the hill, and then by going along on the top I could descend it with ease [on the west side],” Martin said in his memoirs. He scrambled about 600 feet up on the east side of the mountain and had a beautiful view of the entire area; however, he realized he had overestimated both his ability to summit the mountain and get down safely. After descending the same way he came up (twice as slowly as he had ascended), he promised himself to never again set off alone “on such a foolish expedition.” Martin’s view to the south would have been much different than the tree-filled one hikers or those who pull into the northbound U.S. Route 9W viewing lot see today. As a consequence of needing wood for buildings, cooking, heating, and equipment, much of Fort Constitution and West Point were deforested during the Revolutionary War. In his memoirs, Martin recounted several times traveling 5-6 miles away to cut and bring wood back for fires and barracks construction and having no shade at all to rest under while building fortifications on the island.

Bounded by the mighty Hudson River, caused by glaciers millennia ago, and rocks some say are as old as the earth, the landscape of West Point has not significantly changed since the American Revolution. Trees have grown back and the Parade Field was leveled off and made symmetrical as buildings expanded the footprint of the Academy; Washington and Martin would still recognize the landscape today. In fact,

“The Camp is at a place on Hudson’s River call’d West Point, opposite where Fort Constitution once stood. The situation is past description, surrounded with almost inaccessible Mountains, and craggy rocks which overtop the highest hills, at present covered with piles of snow. The river in our front affords a beautiful prospect on our right and left, to New Windsor on one hand and to Fort Montgomery on ye other with some little Islands interspers’d. The surrounding prospect affords a great variety of hills, mountains, rocks, which seem to shut up every avenue to us, and of swamps, meadows, deep Valleys which obstruct the Passage of the Traveller and of small beautiful plains … ”

—An extract from a letter sent by BG Parsons to COL Wadsworth: Camp at West Point, February 22, 1778

Martin and today’s new cadets have almost identical experiences carrying equipment up and down the hills bordering their barracks.

After starting out as a small encampment that grew to 13 forts, redoubts, and batteries (on the west side) during the Revolution, West Point has grown to about 16,000 acres of land after government purchases and annexations. Most of these took place along New York State Route 293 to expand the training area, and land was also purchased to the south of the Plain in the 1800s as the Academy expanded, eventually stopping at what is now Thayer Gate and the northern border of the village of (then) Buttermilk Falls. The 1980s saw the most recent addition to the Academy grounds, the land and buildings belonging to Ladycliff College, which is now called New South Post. After the Frederic V. Malek ’59 Visitors Center opened in 2017, visitors could look north out the floor-to-ceiling lobby windows and admire the south side of the point that caused the river to curve.

West Point is regularly ranked as one of the top three tourist destinations in New York state (competing with the Statue of Liberty and Niagara Falls), and, in warm weather, tours of the Academy are a common sight. Although most readers spent four or more years at their Rockbound Highland Home, West Point magazine invites them to step back from their daily routine and take a minute to look beyond the gray that may inhabit their mind and see and read about current happenings outside of the places that the Corps treads on a daily basis. 

Why is “1778”, as well as “1802,” painted on the ceiling of the Cadet Mess? In January 1778 members of the Continental Army rowed across the river from Fort Constitution and encamped on the west point of the Hudson River. Troops have been stationed at West Point ever since, making it the longest continuously garrisoned fort in the United States Army. Therefore, 1778 is the year the garrison began, and 1802, of course, is the year the Academy was founded.

Constitution Island is not named after the United States Constitution, which was written in 1787. Instead, Revolutionary leaders named what had been called Martelaer’s Rock “Fort Constitution” in 1775 for the constitutional rights they thought Great Britain’s parliament were not affording the colonists as British citizens.

The Great Chain, made of two-foot links that each weighed 180 pounds, was supported across the river on a wooden boom by April 1778. Every fall it was hauled in by a windlass when river operations were suspended due to ice. The river regularly froze each winter, and horse-drawn sleighs and hand-drawn sleds used the frozen river to carry supplies between Newburgh, Nw York and West Point until the war ended in 1783.

The Hudson River, the main transportation route in the Hudson Highlands until the mid-1800s, can be a very unpredictable waterway around West Point. It has a daily tidal change of 2-3 feet (when there is no wind) and is as still as glass twice a day when the tide is changing. However, as visitors to South and North Dock can attest, the river routinely escapes its banks on rainy and windy days.