In December 1782, Army Chaplain Israel Evans proposed building a meeting hall in part to keep soldiers gainfully occupied during the long winter months. Unlike the soldiers' huts, it was handsomely finished with a vaulted ceiling and large, glazed windows. It served mainly for church services, military functions, and occasional musical performances, while rooms at one end housed offices and a store for the quartermaster and commissary and rooms at the other were used for officer meetings and issuing general orders. The name Temple of Virtue may have come from David Fordyce's 1757 sermon The Temple of Virtue A Dream. On February 6, more than 500 officers and local families attended the unfinished building's inaugural event celebrating the anniversary of America's military alliance with France. During the winter of 1782, soldiers grew discontented over unpaid wages and officers worried about the security of their pensions. In early March, under secret instructions from nationalists in the Continental Congress, Major John Armstrong wrote two anonymous letters threatening Congress with military force unless pensions and wages were protected. General George Washington responded by confirming the support of every troop commander, cancelling the conspirators' meeting, and calling his own for March 15. There he gave an impassioned speech, and when the officers remained unmoved, his apology for putting on his spectacles because he had grown gray and almost blind in his country's service helped quell their unrest and end the crisis.
