Carriages at the Ordnance Depot

Rows of gun carriages, chassis and machine timber drawn up in the sand before the depot's sheds, one man seated among them like a clerk in an inventory. The Library of Congress dates the record 1865.

A depot photographed at the end of a war is an argument already settled: everything in the frame was landed, hauled, issued, recovered and lined up again by the quartermasters and ordnance officers whose paper war this site's almanac counts night by night. The guns went home from places like this.