Camp Evans Historic District National Register of Historic Places Listing

Marconi started it all here. In 1914, his company built a massive wireless receiver station on this Wall Township tract to capture transatlantic radio waves. The Navy seized it during World War I. By 1941, the Army took over. They needed a secret space to develop radar, so they built a sprawling lab complex. Speed mattered. Technicians inside these brick buildings scrambled to perfect the SCR-270 radar, the exact system that later spotted Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor. Sadly, commanders ignored that warning.

After the war, things got weird. Actually, they got celestial on a freezing January morning in 1946 during Project Diana. Scientists bounced a radar signal off the moon. It took exactly 2.56 seconds for the echo to return to Wall Township. This proved we could talk through space. Walter McAfee, a brilliant Black theoretical physicist, did the crucial math to make it happen. McAfee faced ugly segregation outside the gates. Inside, Camp Evans was different. It employed Black and female scientists when corporate America refused to do so.

Today, the site wears its history on its sleeve, though it looks a bit weathered. Rusting satellite dishes still point at the sky. A few buildings still contain traces of radiation from Cold War nuclear research. They did dirty work here. But now, volunteers run a tech museum in the old Marconi hotel. They keep the vintage vacuum tubes and spy gear alive. It is a quiet place now. Walk the grounds, though, and you can almost hear the crackle of the early wireless.