Waterways Experiment Station

The Waterways Experiment Station, also known as WES-Original Cantonment in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is a sprawling 673acre complex built in 1930 as a United States Army Corps of Engineers research facility. Its campus is the site of the headquarters of the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) of the Corps of Engineers. WES is the largest of the four Corps of Engineers' research and development laboratories.The facility was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2000 in part for its architecture. The listing was for a 16acre area roughly bounded by Spillway, Durden Creek, Tennessee Rd., and Dam Spillway, in Vicksburg, with five contributing buildings and three contributing structures.HistoryThe modern interest in scale modeling to study hydraulic engineering may be traced back to a demonstration model of flow over a weir in a glass-sided flume at the University of Michigan in the late 19th century. A visiting professor from the Technical College at Dresden, witnessed the model and upon his return, built a similar model in Dresden. Other hydraulic models were built at Karlsruhe and Delft soon afterwards. John Freeman is credited with reviving interest in hydraulic models in the United States, establishing a traveling fellowship in his name with the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1925 after repeated visits to the laboratory in Dresden.