The Fort Reno Tower is the brick tower in Fort Reno Park in Tenleytown, built to look like the two water towers beside it, which researchers of Cold War communications identify as part of a secret network linking the White House to emergency relocation sites outside Washington. The park holds the highest natural ground in the District, about 409 feet above sea level. Little about the tower is officially documented. An Army Corps of Engineers survey of 1994 records that the Army held part of the park from June 1951 to March 1953 to plan the capital's anti-aircraft defences during the Korean War, and that in that time the government installed an underground defence communications system and an antenna tower.
Independent researchers and writers describe the present tower as a site code-named Cartwheel, built from about 1961, with its antennas hidden behind a radome and a microwave link to Mount Weather in Virginia. The code name and the link have never been officially confirmed. What is on the record is that by 1994 the Federal Aviation Administration used the site as a remote transmitter facility, and that in 2007 the National Capital Planning Commission approved an upgrade to the FAA facility there.
The hilltop was a fort first. Begun in 1861 as Fort Pennsylvania and renamed in 1863 for Major General Jesse Reno, killed at South Mountain, it guarded the northern approach to the capital, and its lookouts were among the first to see Jubal Early's army advancing in July 1864. The ramparts were levelled for a reservoir around 1900.
Getting there
38.9532, -77.0782
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