Greely Field

Greely Field. . , This area is designated Greely Field in honor of Major General Adolphus Washington Greely, Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army from 3 March 1887 to 6 February 1906., From the time he entered the Army as a private during the Civil War, General Greely's career was studded with brilliant achievement. His extraordinary capacity to visualize modern communication development laid the firm foundation upon which much of the structure the present-day Signal Corps is built., As a lieutenant from 1881-1884, he led a polar scientific expedition which penetrated closer to the North Pole than ever attained at that time. Under his indefatigable leadership and initiative as Chief Signal Officer, the Signal Corps interlaced the Philippines with a land line and submarine cable system of communications, which by 1901 embraced 6,500 miles of remote island territory, much of it through jungle., Another brilliant accomplishment was the laying in 1903-1904 of submarine cable through the unsurveyed and treacherous waters of the Northwest coast which linked Alaska with Seattle, and the construction of a military telegraph line 1,200 miles through the heart of Alaska from Valdez to Nome., Adolphus Washington Greely , 1844 - 1935 , Major General , Chief Signal Officer of the Army , 1887 - 1906.