Getting to the bottom of the mystery of Hilltop Silo in Buckingham
We agreed on one question when I showed daughter Genevieve the photo I took: “What’s that?” To us, it looked like something out of the sci-fi series “Lost”. The image was of an 82-foot-high cement silo notched with windows and rising to a suspended disk platform bristling with antennae. A landing pad for a UFO?
The tower is on the southern end of 3-mile-long Buckingham Mountain and sheltered from view by dense woods. I stumbled upon it while exploring woodlands in search of some vestige of fabled Wolf Rocks. The tower got me to wondering about its history. Using Google’s internet search engine, I quickly discovered what I was looking for. The tower is historic, a vestige of nuclear bomb scares of the 1950s. Here’s the story:
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After the Soviet Union exploded its first nuke in 1949, defense officials in Washington contemplated the unthinkable. What if Russians A-bombed a major U.S. city? Would communications be cut off? What if many major cities were attacked all at once from coast to coast? Beside the horror of such an attack, AT&T executive C.C. Ducan noted one of its side effects: “With the advent of nuclear bombing and the possibility simultaneous bombing might destroy a large number of cities, we realized that our long-distance telephone facilities might be seriously crippled.”
The company along with Bell Telephone began an intense study of what would be needed for their networks to survive. A transcontinental system of microwave transmission towers through remote areas seemed a likely solution. Built on mountaintops, each tower would be about 30 miles from the next to create wireless “express and bypass routes” around population centers.
AT&T earlier proved the feasibility of using microwave technology to relay TV broadcasts. On Nov. 13, 1947, the company successfully used microwave transmitters to relay television signals via 7 hilltop radio towers between Boston and New York City. To work effectively, the towers were built with unobstructed views, one tower to the next.
A national microwave network would follow a circuitous route around cities likely to be A-bomb targets. The task required buying land and building lofty towers, mostly of interlocking structural steel. In Pennsylvania, Buckingham Mountain about 40 miles north of Philadelphia for a poured concrete silo. With steel in short supply after World War II and the Korean War, AT&T reasoned concrete would be more cost-effective. It wasn’t. Only a few concrete towers were built.
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The Buckingham tower included a large rooftop platform to support massive microwave transmitters with uninterrupted line-of-sight to hilltop towers in Wyndmoor to the west and Martinsville, N.J. to the east. The three towers were among 122 built to span 3,660 miles between Los Angeles and Plainview, New York.
On June 12, 1957, the TD2 network came alive as part of “Operation Alert” simulating a widespread nuclear bombing. As sirens blared in Los Angeles and 200 other target cities from coast to coast, citizens were directed to public shelters or other areas deemed safety zones. In LA, the drill projected one million casualties after the dropping of two hydrogen bombs. Activated disaster centers turned to the TD2 network to re-establish radio contact between government, civil defense, and military authorities. The network proved to be reliable in the test though deactivated years later.
In 1967, Buckingham Mountain tower and its sister towers in this region became TVS 21 relaying television broadcasts between Troy Hill near Pittsburgh and Jackie Jones Mountain near West Haverstraw, N.Y. Today, Buckingham’s silo is a relic. Its microwave transmitters have been removed. The tower appears structurally sound and is owned at last report by American Tower Corporation which describes itself as a global wireless infrastructure provider. It leases the site to various tenants including cell phone firms whose aerials sit atop the tower.
Sources include “Communications and Defense” by C.C. Duncan published in 1958 edition by AT&T; “The Bell System's Microwave Radio and Coaxial Cable Networks” on the web at https://long-lines.net/documents/index.html , and “AT&T Microwave Station: Buckingham” on the web at http://long-lines.net/places-routes/Buckingham/Buckingham.html.
Carl LaVO and his grandson Dashiell will appear at the Doylestown Bookshop Saturday at noon to sign their book “Bucks County Adventures for Kids”. Carl can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Getting to the bottom of the mystery of Hilltop Silo in Buckingham
