Telegraph

ESTABLISHING COMMUNICATION

Here the camera has caught the U. S. Military Telegraph Construction Corps in action, April, 1864. The 150-odd men composing it were active throughout the war in planting poles and stringing wires in order to keep the Central Telegraph Office in direct communication with the armies at all times. Lincoln spent many an evening in the War Department

Building at the capital reading the dispatches from the front handed to him by the operators. The photograph but faintly indicates the flexible insulated wire, which by this time had come into use, and in the picture is being strung along by the two men on the poles and the three in advance of them in the left foreground.