Greely Field honors Major General Adolphus Washington Greely, Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army from 3 March 1887 to 6 February 1906. From his entry into the Army as a private during the Civil War, Greely's career included major achievements. As a lieutenant from 1881-1884, he led a polar scientific expedition that reached closer to the North Pole than had been attained before that time. As Chief Signal Officer, he helped lay the foundation for much of the present-day Signal Corps through his vision of modern communications development. Under his leadership, the Signal Corps built a land line and submarine cable communications system across the Philippines that by 1901 embraced 6,500 miles of remote island territory, much of it through jungle. In 1903-1904, it also laid submarine cable through the unsurveyed and treacherous waters of the Northwest coast to link Alaska with Seattle and constructed a military telegraph line 1,200 miles through the heart of Alaska from Valdez to Nome.