Camp Evans Historic District

Camp Evans Historic District is an area of the Camp Evans Formerly Used Defense Site in Wall Township, New Jersey. The site of the military installation (40°11′08″N 074°03′45″W / 40.18556°N 74.06250°W / 40.18556; -74.06250) is noted for a 1941 transatlantic radio receiver and various World War II/Cold War laboratories of the United States Army (e.g., signal, vacuum tube, dosimetry, & photo-optics). It was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 2012, in recognition of the site's long role in the development of modern civilian and military electronic communications.

The Belmar Receiving Station was established near the Belmar community together with a separate transatlantic transmitting facility at New Brunswick, New Jersey, by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (American Marconi). The Belmar station included a mile-long bronze-wire receiving antenna strung on six 400 foot tall masts with three 150 foot balancing towers along the Shark River. Outgoing Morse-code messages were sent via a telegraph land-line from the Belmar Station to the transmitter. The receiving site also had a telegraph land-line to a New York office.

Original buildings on the campus (40°11′09″N 74°03′34″W / 40.1859°N 74.0594°W / 40.1859; -74.0594^{[citation needed]}) were built by the J.G. White Engineering Corp. between 1912 and 1914. This was part of the Guglielmo Marconi's wireless girdle around the Earth. In one of the buildings being constructed for the Belmar station, the regenerative circuit was demonstrated on January 31/February 1, 1914.

In April 1917, the Belmar station was acquired as part of the Navy's World War I Trans-Atlantic Communication System and after the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, American Marconi regained the Belmar station, which Radio Corporation of America owned from October 1919 until 1924. In 1924, the site was returned to Radio Corporation of America (RCA) ownership.

RCA sold the site to the Monmouth County Pleasure Seekers Club which was closely tied to Arthur H. Bell and the Ku Klux Klan. They owned the site from 1925 to 1935.

The Young People's Association for the Propagation of the Gospel purchased the Belmar station in 1936, and The King's College opened in September 1938 — when it was denied accreditation it relocated (currently it is in the Empire State Building).

The Signal Corps Radar Laboratory (SCRL) of Fort Hancock (formerly "Field Laboratory No. 3") in the late 1930s used a field set-up at the Belmar station to compare US radars with the British CH-CHL Radars (additional testing of hardware was often done at the nearby Twin Lights radar station, such as a trial radar network in 1939).

In 1941 the Belmar radio site was renamed the Evans Signal Laboratory after Wall Township purchased the original Marconi buildings and the surrounding 93 acres for the Army to move the SCRL. Initial construction of Camp Evans Historic District quickly built more than two dozen buildings and structures on the open land to the south and west of the Marconi buildings, including 2 boiler houses, 4 long rectangular one-story buildings, and two groups of radio antenna shelters. Two models of the SCR-271 radar were located near the intersection of Monmouth Boulevard and Watson Road (the model D had a sign for the SCRL Installation and Maintenance School).