Lost War Department Papers

Fire destroyed the office of the War Department and all its files in 1800, and for decades historians believed that the collection, and the window it provided into the workings of the early federal government, was lost forever.

Thanks to a decade-long effort to retrieve copies of the files scattered in archives across the country, the collection has been reconstituted and is now offered online as a fully searchable digital database.

Check it out at: http://wardepartmentpapers.org/