Mount Vernon was the site of important U.S. Army posts throughout the 19th century. The first, Fort Stoddert, was established in 1799 on the Mobile River to control and tax river traffic to Spanish colonial Mobile, but because malaria and yellow fever plagued the low-lying fort, a nearby hilltop at Mount Vernon Springs was cleared in 1811 for a seasonal camp. For the next few years Mount Vernon Cantonment and Fort Stoddert together served as military headquarters for this part of Mississippi Territory until both were abandoned in 1815 at the end of the Creek War and the War of 1812. After Andrew Jackson became President of the United States, he directed the U.S. Army to build an arsenal at the springs, and from 1830 to 1870 Mount Vernon Arsenal served as a weapons depot and factory for small arms munitions, including under Confederate control between 1861 and 1865. In 1873 the Army renamed the post Mount Vernon Barracks and stationed infantry, artillery, and cavalry there, and between 1887 and 1894 it held hundreds of Chiricahua Apache prisoners on the reservation outside the old arsenal walls, including Geronimo, while Dr. Walter Reed served as post surgeon. In 1895 the U.S. War Department decommissioned the post and gave it to the State of Alabama, which opened Mount Vernon Hospital there in 1902 for mentally ill African-American residents; renamed Searcy Hospital in 1919 and desegregated in 1969, it remained an important mental health facility. Nine standing structures and part of a brick wall survive from the arsenal and barracks period, forming the most complete and best-preserved early 19th-century U.S. Army arsenal complex in the country; the buildings were documented in 1935 and the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.