Laundering was not a new activity for the War Department, since when the war was declared the Government already owned 14 small steam laundries.[Armorer's note: the first one of these was at Fort Leavenworth, located in the building I currently labor in.]  Later the Government went into the laundry business on the scale demanded by the great chain of training camps, building cantonment laundries at a cost of approximately $300,000 each. Experienced laundrymen were placed in charge of camp laundries. Through the cooperation with the Government’s insect experts of the Bureau of Entomology, laundering processes were worked out successfully to disinfect all clothing while washing it and to free it from vermin without shrinking fabrics or causing other damage.

Government laundries during the war operated 24 hours per day with three labor shifts and cleaned an average of 10,909,850 pieces of clothing monthly, with gross receipts of over $500,000 per month, approximately half of which was profit.

One of the most interesting features of laundry activity was the development of mobile laundry units for overseas use near the front. The men to operate these units were trained in a special school at Camp Meigs, D. C. Each mobile unit required a crew of 37 men. The men of the Army nicknamed these special troops the “Fighting Chinamen.” The need of the American Expeditionary Forces for wash-up and delousing stations at the front, so that even troops engaged in battle might have clean clothes, called the mobile laundry- units into being.

The first experimental equipment was designed and constructed early in 1918. After that the salvage service produced 50 others, 32 of which were shipped to France. Each unit consisted of a large steam tractor and four trailers, an outfit which on the road made up a train over 100 feet long. The trailers could be placed together in the field to form a building 30 feet long and 28 feet wide, the tractor acting as the power plant. On the trailers were washing machines, wringers, drying machines, tanks for water and soap, a pump, and a dynamo to supply electric lights. One of these plants working 24 hours per day could do the washing of 10,000 men. This unit was designed by officers of the salvage division. Army laundry activity was in charge of three New York laundry-men: J. E. Dann, president of the Pilgrim Laundry, of Brooklyn, and his assistants, William Longfelder, of H. Kohnstamm & Co., and E. D. Tribbett, of the American Laundry Machinery Co.