World War I created a need for increased medical care for returning soldiers, leading to the opening in 1924 of Veterans Hospital No. 100 on the grounds of Fort Custer, a 500-bed neuropsychiatric facility originally made up of twenty-two Neo-Georgian structures arranged in a crescent shape. Like other Veterans Bureau facilities of the time, it was built from standardized floor plans at a cost of nearly three million dollars. When it was erected, trenches, sand dunes, and barren soil dominated the site, but between 1927 and 1930, 9,400 trees were planted across the 675-acre grounds, including English walnut trees transplanted from the Battle Creek Sanitarium that had originally been grown in Mt. Vernon, Virginia.