The Camp Street and the Lookout

A street of wooden quarters runs back toward a house wearing a lookout tower on its roof; a field gun and limber stand in the road, one soldier walks toward the camera and another poses with his rifle. Haas & Peale exposed two plates of this scene — the Library of Congress numbers them 83 and 83A — and both survive in the staged material.

The tower is the tell. On an island this flat, height was intelligence, and the army grafted observation posts onto whatever would bear them. Between the lookout above and the gun in the street, this 'unidentified camp' reads plainly enough: a rear area that never entirely believed it was rear.