This building housed army enlisted men serving in the artillery or infantry from the 1830s until Fort Trumbull was downgraded to a supply post, in 1907. Built of rough-cut granite, the original stone section dates from about 1830, the same year that the army built the officers' quarters (now the visitors' center). An observer wrote at the time, "The soldiers' barracks are the best I have ever seen in the United States." The wooden section, which no longer exists, was probably added in the 1840s.
In 1910 Fort Trumbull found a new use as a training school for the Revenue Cutter Service, the bureau that enforced treaties and tariffs on the seas. The school set up classrooms and a drill hall in the wooden portion of this building and partitioned the stone section to accommodate two cadets to a room. Congress merged the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life Saving Service in 1915 to form the U.S. Coast Guard, and the school became the Coast Guard Academy.
The Coast Guard found this nineteenth-century structure outdated as living quarters and eventually built new multistory barracks for the cadets. The academy then converted this building to a library and added the curved double staircase that remains today.
The building was used primarily as offices after the Coast Guard Academy moved to its present location up the Thames River, in 1932. New stone construction replaced the wooden section in 2000. The original nineteenth-century stone building still stands to the left of this sign.
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