Established in 1826 on former common land of the French village of Carondelet, Jefferson Barracks became a strategically placed military post on the west bank of the Mississippi, chosen for its central location, nearness to the Confluence, and access to limestone and timber, and it served as a supply center for forts along the upper Mississippi and its tributaries as well as southern posts including Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Forts Gibson, Jesup, Macomb, and Towson. Almost every major military figure in early American history passed through it, including Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and while overseeing engineering work on the Mississippi River channel at St. Louis, 1st Lt Robert E. Lee lived there. During the Civil War, U.S. Army generals Joseph E. Johnston, Albert Sidney Johnston, James Longstreet, and Braxton Bragg, all of whom had served there, resigned their commissions and fought for the South. In 1866, the first black regular army regiments in United States history, later called buffalo soldiers, included the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 38th through 41st Infantry, and the 38th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry were begun at Jefferson Barracks. The post proved highly adaptable, serving at different times as an ordnance depot, the Army's National Mule Headquarters, an engineer base, a cavalry post, a general hospital, a basic training camp, and an induction and separation center; during the Civil War it had one of the country's largest Federal hospitals, with more than 3,000 beds, treating patients from battles as distant as Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was also the site of the first successful parachute jump from an airplane, made by civilian Albert Berry on March 2, 1912, and in the years surrounding World War II it expanded dramatically, housing 1,500 soldiers in 1939, 6,000 Air Corps recruits in 1940, and from 1941 to 1945 serving as an induction and separation center, a basic training camp, the Army Air Corps' largest technical training school, and a detention camp for Axis prisoners of war. The site now includes Jefferson Barracks County Park, Sylvan Springs County Park, a National Guard base, the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, and a Veteran's Administration Hospital. Jefferson Barracks also figured in the rise of rail transport in Missouri: before the 1850s, iron and lead ore had to be hauled by wagon 40 miles to the river, and river travel itself was hazardous, but after the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad was established in 1852, controversy arose because the line crossed government property at the post, where the U.S. War Department feared locomotive sparks might ignite ordnance magazines, requiring engines to be detached and trains pulled by horse and mule through the area until Congress granted a right-of-way in 1854 and the 84.5-mile line to Pilot Knob was completed on April 2, 1857. That rail connection later proved important to the post, including during the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the 11th Infantry and 3rd Cavalry were sent out for service and the St. Louis Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad carried the troops, horses, and baggage, and the railway remained invaluable in moving goods and passengers to and from the installation.