Barack Obama went to Fort Hayes High School in Fort Hayes, Ohio last week to sell Ohioans on the American Jobs Act, but maybe he should have stopped for a class in local history first.  Obama promised that his bill would get spent in part renovating buildings at Fort Hayes, but Obama seemed to be unclear just when they were built:

Ohio, if you pass this bill, then right here in this state, tens of thousands of construction workers will have a job again. (Applause.) This is one of the most common-sense ideas out there. All over the country, there are roads and bridges and schools just like Fort Hayes in need of repair. Some of the buildings here at Fort Hayes were originally built during the Civil War. That’s old.

It sure is … a little too old.  Fort Hayes didn’t exist during the Civil War.  The federal government commissioned what was later known as the Columbus Arsenal and then Columbus Barracks late in the war, but the first and only personnel and warehouse building erected during that time was the arsenal, called the Main Building, which served as the headquarters … until the government tore it down in 1910.  Most of the other buildings on the site were added between 1890 and 191o.  The site itself wasn’t called Fort Hayes until 1922, and more buildings were added in 1933 — presumably as part of FDR’s public-works projects in the New Deal.

That doesn’t make Fort Hayes’ buildings new, but they’re not from the Civil War, not any of them.  And even if they were, that wouldn’t necessarily make them valueless anyway. (H/T reader Lloyd P)

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