Col. Henry Morrow was wounded at Gettysburg in 1863. He was wounded during the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. And he was wounded at Petersburg in 1865.
Morrow certainly did his share for the Union cause. But his most lasting contribution to America’s military came when he lived in Vancouver. In 1880, Col. Morrow was commander of the 21st Infantry Regiment, based at Vancouver Barracks.
He created a one-room getaway for his soldiers that now is a global enterprise. As we noted Wednesday, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site is the birthplace of what became the Army’s PX system — now the Army & Air Force Exchange Services.
An interpretive panel just inside the door of the current retail outlet, called a shoppette, tells how Morrow was seeing his troops lose their money in Vancouver’s saloons. It quotes Morrow as saying: “Gentlemen, something must be done for these soldiers. It is not right to let them go on as prey and victims of these saloons.”
(A version on the AAFES website says that Morrow was getting tired of “his troops landing in the brig after carousing on the town.”)
On Nov. 29, 1880, he opened a base canteen, borrowing the name from a similar Spanish army facility known as a cantina.
He stocked it with newspapers, magazines, billiards tables, cards, food and beverages, according to the AAFES history. As soldiers spent more off-duty time there, “disciplinary actions dropped dramatically.”
Other frontier posts followed Morrow’s example; in 1895, the War Department ordered all commanders to open post exchanges. The system now ranks No. 52 on the National Retail Federation’s Top 100 Retailers list, according to its website.
And it followed American troops around the world, resulting in one poignant story on website. In 1973, at the end of the Vietnam War, almost 600 former American POWs — some held as long as eight years — were flown to a U.S. base in the Philippines.
At the base exchange, Col. Herschel Morgan bought two fishing rods: one for himself and one for the 7-year-old son he’d never met.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
