Search Markers

Archer City, TX

During the Civil War the Confederacy strung a thin line of frontier posts from the Red River to the Rio Grande, and Camp Cureton anchored a stretch of it near where the Gainesville–Fort Belknap road crossed the West Fork of the Trinity. Manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment and named for veteran Indian-fighter Capt. Jack Cureton, its poorly supplied troopers patrolled against Comanche raids while guarding supply trains and watching for Union movement. Contemporaries judged them more effective at curbing raids than the U.S. Army had been.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1992

When war came in April 1861, eighty acres of Harrisburg ground became one of the Union's most important training grounds, named for the state's energetic wartime governor, Andrew Gregg Curtin. Between 1861 and 1865, more military units were mustered and drilled here than at any other Northern camp. Tens of thousands of raw recruits became soldiers on this field.

Alamo, TX

In the early 1900s, ranchers Peter Ebenezer Blalock and George L. Hawkins amassed 32,000 acres in the lower Rio Grande Valley and built shipping pens beside a railroad depot they named Ebenezer. When their ranch was sold in 1909, the Alamo Land and Sugar Company transformed the tract into farmland, luring prospective buyers south on excursion trains and lodging them at "Camp Ebenezer." The depot's 1919 move a mile east seeded the town of Alamo.

Westtown Township, PA · est. 2013

In the weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, more than 2,000 Union soldiers—captured and then paroled by the retreating Confederates—were gathered at a makeshift camp on this ground to await formal exchange. Under the era's parole system, captured men were often released on a pledge not to fight and held instead by their own army. The surrounding community took them in and nursed the wounded until the federal government voided the paroles and sent the men back to their regiments.

Sterling City, TX

Camp Elizabeth, thought to date to 1853, served from 1874 to 1886 as an outpost hospital and sub-post of Fort Concho during the height of the frontier military presence on the West Texas plains. Such outposts anchored the U.S. Army's effort to secure travel routes and settlements during the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. Little remains, but its role in the network of frontier defense endures in memory.

Winona, TX

As World War II swelled the nation's military, construction began at Camp Fannin near Tyler in late 1942, named for Texas revolutionary hero James Walker Fannin, Jr. Opened in 1943 as an Infantry Replacement Training Center, at its peak it processed 35,000 to 40,000 men every four months to replace troops lost on the battlefronts, and it also held German prisoners of war and a Women's Army Corps unit. The camp reshaped the East Texas economy, and after the war some soldiers — and even a former POW — returned to settle in the region.

Winona, TX

Alongside its role training American soldiers, Camp Fannin near Tyler became a prisoner-of-war camp, receiving its first captives from Germany's Afrika Korps in October 1943. By 1944 it was designated a POW base camp overseeing smaller branch camps across East Texas, and with wartime labor scarce, prisoners were put to work in the region's forests and farms. The camp held more than 1,000 prisoners at a time and closed in May 1946 after repatriating them.

Barksdale, TX

Camp Fawcett opened in 1928 as a Boy Scout camp for the Southwest Texas Council, named for the council president E. K. Fawcett. It drew scouts from a broad sweep of counties across the Texas Hill Country and border region until that council merged with the Concho Valley Council in 1943. Its central gathering place, Main Hall, honors a 1930 camping chairman.

Tyler, TX

Camp Ford was a Confederate stockade near Tyler that held captured Union soldiers during the Civil War, growing into the largest prisoner-of-war camp west of the Mississippi River. Prisoners built log huts inside the log-walled enclosure, enduring crowding and shortages until the war's end. Though this marker's text is spare, the site stands for the grim experience of thousands of captured federal troops in Texas.

Tyler, TX

On this Smith County site stood Camp Ford, the largest Confederate prison for Union captives west of the Mississippi. Established in 1862 as a training camp named for Col. John S. "Rip" Ford, it was converted to a prison in 1863 and, after Confederate victories in 1864, expanded to hold some 4,700 Federal soldiers and sailors. Prisoners built their own crude shelters — log huts, burrows, and brush arbors they called "shebangs" — and drew water from a nearby spring until the camp's abandonment at war's end in 1865.

Lower Swatara Township, PA · est. 1966

Sprawling across three square miles just northwest of here, Camp Meade was a sizable military encampment opened during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and named in honor of the Civil War general who commanded Union forces at Gettysburg. Its importance was underscored when President William McKinley visited the camp on August 27, 1898.

Charlotte, NC

In the summer of 1917, weeks after America entered the Great War, the U.S. Army carved a sprawling training cantonment out of the Carolina countryside west of Charlotte and named it for Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. For two years Camp Greene turned tens of thousands of raw recruits into soldiers bound for the trenches of France, its muddy streets and hastily built barracks briefly making it one of the largest 'cities' in North Carolina. When the camp closed in 1919, the Mecklenburg Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution set this stone to keep the memory of those men — and the vanished camp — from fading back into the fields.

Victoria, TX

In the opening months of the Civil War, the Confederacy scrambled to raise and drill volunteers across Texas. At the suggestion of Col. Henry McCullouch, a site near Victoria known as Nuner's Mott was chosen in 1861 to muster and train recruits drawn from nine surrounding counties. The men formed the Sixth Texas Infantry, drilling here into the spring of 1862 before marching to a hard war — captured at Arkansas Post, then fighting through Missionary Ridge, Atlanta, Franklin, and Nashville. They finally laid down their arms with the Army of Tennessee in North Carolina.

Del Rio, TX

When U.S. troops surrendered their Texas posts at the outbreak of the Civil War, Camp Hudson on the Devil's River became a Confederate frontier outpost from 1861 to 1862, manned by the 2nd Texas Cavalry. Its soldiers guarded the military road, escorted supply trains, and served as a base for the Confederate New Mexico campaign aimed at reaching the Pacific and choking off gold to the North. To pass the tedium, troops eager to fight for the Confederacy even produced a camp newspaper.

Huntsville, TX

Completed in 1942, Camp Huntsville was one of the first prisoner-of-war camps built in the United States during World War II, with more than 400 buildings and room for 3,000 prisoners. The first arrivals were captured members of Germany's Afrika Korps in spring 1943, and the population peaked at 4,840 that fall. Late in the war it prepared to receive Japanese prisoners before closing in January 1946, when its land became a country campus for Sam Houston State Teachers College.

Kingsville, TX

In the fall of 1915, as raids spilled north across the Rio Grande during the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. Army pitched Camp Kingsville to shield the great South Texas ranches and the San Antonio rail line. For two years its infantry companies patrolled a tense borderland; then in 1917 General Pershing tapped the 26th Infantry's men to help form the First Division, and the camp emptied as they shipped for France. Its founder, Joseph Dorst Patch, went on to a decorated career across two world wars, retiring as a major general.

Straban Township, PA

In the sweltering weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the fields east of town became Camp Letterman, the largest field hospital of the Civil War, where thousands of wounded soldiers from both armies were treated in orderly rows of tents. Named for Dr. Jonathan Letterman, the Army of the Potomac's medical director whose battlefield-evacuation system revolutionized military medicine, the camp combined surgery, convalescence, and an adjoining cemetery. The fragment quoted here — a grim bedside note that a soldier's recovery 'is yet doubtful' — captures the daily uncertainty that hung over the men who lay here through the summer and fall.

Weslaco, TX

In 1916 and 1917, National Guard units from Indiana, Nebraska, Minnesota, and North Dakota occupied Camp Llano Grande, one of a chain of encampments strung along the Rio Grande to guard against cross-border raids. The 200-acre camp held a headquarters, commissary, parade grounds, and sprawling tent lines south of the railroad. It was abandoned in March 1917, just a month before the U.S. entered World War I, and its soldiers were soon bound for France.

Houston, TX

Soon after the United States entered World War I, the Army established Camp Logan here in July 1917 as one of 34 training camps, a 7,600-acre complex named for Civil War general and senator John A. Logan. During construction, Black soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry, stationed nearby, rose in armed revolt on August 23, 1917, against Houston's Jim Crow laws and police abuse—the deadly "Houston Mutiny and Riot of 1917." Divisions trained here shipped out to fight in France in 1918, and after the camp closed part of its land became Memorial Park, named for the soldiers who fought in Europe.

Albert Township, MI

In June 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression, two hundred young unmarried men arrived in the northern Michigan woods as part of the newly created Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the first New Deal relief programs. They pitched their tents on Hunt Creek and soon settled at this spot, naming it Camp Lunden. Corpsmen across the country planted trees, fought fires, and built trails and stream improvements, sending most of their pay home to struggling families.

Austin, TX

Austin's citizens gave 85 acres in 1892 for annual encampments of the Texas Volunteer Guard, the elite militia formed in 1876, and the guardsmen worked to expand it to more than 430 acres. Named in 1898 for Adjutant General Woodford H. Mabry, the camp gained an arsenal in 1914, hosted the U.S. Army in both World Wars, and trained Texas Rangers and highway patrolmen. Since 1954 it has served as headquarters for the state Adjutant General.

Waco, TX

Founded in July 1917, Camp MacArthur was named for Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur—Civil War veteran, distinguished officer in the Philippines, and father of Douglas MacArthur—and built to train the National Guard's 32nd Division for World War I. Its capacity of more than 45,000 dwarfed Waco's own population of 32,000, filling the city with troops first from Michigan and Wisconsin and later from across the country. The 32nd shipped out to France in early 1918, and the camp became a replacement and officer-training center before demobilizing thousands that December.

Paris, TX

When the nation began mobilizing on the eve of World War II, the city of Paris lobbied hard for an army training camp, seeing in peacetime draftees a way to revive the local economy. After a political tug-of-war—Congressman Lyndon Johnson briefly diverted the camp to his own district—Senator Tom Connally secured it for Paris, and Camp Maxey was activated in July 1942 on a 70,000-acre site. Named for Confederate general and U.S. senator Sam Bell Maxey, it trained nearly 195,000 soldiers, housed a hospital and a 7,000-man German POW camp, and filled thousands of civilian jobs before closing in 1946.

Humboldt County, NV

From 1865 to 1868 the U.S. Army ran Camp McGarry near Summit Springs on the Old Applegate Trail, its troops guarding the Idaho-California mail and stage roads and the emigrant trails threading Nevada and Oregon. The post grew to include officers' quarters, barracks, a mess hall, and a 100-horse stone barn, and in 1866 became headquarters of the District of Nevada. At 75 square miles it was the largest military reservation in the state before its abandonment in 1868, when the troops moved to Camp Winfield Scott; the land later became an American Indian reservation.

Harris County, GA

This 350-acre tract served for roughly 75 years as the official camp of the local Boy Scout councils. Incorporated in 1921 under leaders like W. W. McKenzie and Fred H. Schomburg, the camp was expanded in 1965 when Cason J. Callaway, Jr. helped donate an adjacent tract named Camp Callaway. In the 1950s the council arranged for new camping grounds on West Point Lake, and the marker honors the men whose foresight gave generations of boys a place to learn and grow.

San Saba, TX

During the Civil War, Camp McMillan was one link in a chain of Confederate outposts strung a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment. Its patrols guarded settlers against raids, rounded up draft evaders, and held a vast stretch of the frontier while the great battles raged far to the east. Backed by state rangers, militia, and citizen posses operating from nearby family forts, these Confederates defended a two-thousand-mile line at real cost to their own lives.

Town of Hempstead, NY

From 1869 into the early 1920s, Methodists gathered on the grounds north of this marker for annual camp meetings — open-air revivals of preaching, singing, and prayer that could stretch for days. Camp meetings were a hallmark of nineteenth-century American religious life, drawing families from miles around to worship and socialize in a temporary tent community. Such gatherings blended faith, fellowship, and rural recreation in equal measure.

Iraan, TX

Where the often flood-swollen Pecos River could be crossed, travelers found a lifeline for centuries. Spanish explorer Juan Domínguez de Mendoza camped and forded here in 1684, trader Henry Connelly used the same spot in 1840, and in 1868 the U.S. Army — seeking a safer route than Comanche-plagued Horsehead Crossing — built a floating pontoon bridge whose landings could shift with the river's width. To guard travelers the Army established nearby Camp Melvin, but by the 1920s better roads had left the crossing to history.

Mercedes, TX

In March 1917, just before the United States entered World War I, Gen. John J. Pershing selected Mercedes for a permanent camp to train troops bound for France. Completed that April on the 80-acre Emerson Farm tract, Camp Mercedes centered on a parade ground ringed by 23 barracks and 14 identical officers' bungalows, garrisoning 16 officers, 700 men and 600 horses. A cavalry cadre occupied it in May before recruits arrived, and after the Armistice the post was demobilized and closed in 1922.

Del Rio, TX

During the 1910s the Army established Camp Del Rio to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border amid the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, with troops guarding vital railroad bridges like the High Bridge over the Pecos. Those tracks were a strategic transcontinental link during World War I. In 1920 the post was renamed Camp Michie for Brigadier General Robert E. L. Michie, who was killed in France in 1918, and the government closed it in 1923.

Bandera, TX

Established in 1862, Camp Montel was one link in the Confederate defense line stretching from the Red River to the Rio Grande, named for surveyor and Bandera colonizer Captain Charles DeMontel. Its troops of the Texas Frontier Regiment furnished their own guns and mounts but often went short of food, clothing, and supplies as they guarded settlements against raids. With most local men away at war—Bandera County counted just 399 people in 1860—these scouting parties managed to curb frontier attacks until the war's end.

Zavalla, TX

Camp Nancy began as one of the many logging camps that cut through the Piney Woods in the early 20th century, moving to the Angelina County community of Dunkin around 1918 with its offices, commissary, school, and boxcar homes for workers. Unusually long-lived for a logging camp, it also hosted a turpentine operation and pioneered new methods—replacing ox teams with cable skidders and, in 1925, undertaking Texas's first large-scale direct seeding to reforest cutover land. After logging moved on in 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps continued reforestation before the land became part of Angelina National Forest.

Jessamine County, KY

Established in 1863, Camp Nelson housed the families of African American soldiers and became the chief center issuing emancipation papers to the formerly enslaved. Conditions in the makeshift camp were deadly—many women and children died of disease and exposure, and a brutal winter expulsion in 1864 killed many more—until the Reverend John G. Fee and other humanitarian workers won improvements. A school, hospital, and permanent housing eventually served up to 3,000 people in their transition to freedom, though the Army's 1866 withdrawal left refugees exposed to violent white "regulators."

Carson City, NV

Established just north of here in October 1864, Camp Nye was the home base of Companies D and E of the 1st Nevada Volunteer Cavalry during the Civil War. Rather than fighting Confederates, these Union troopers were largely engaged in conflicts with American Indians across the region; Company D suffered Nevada's only two combat deaths of the war in a battle at Table Mountain in Elko County on May 20, 1865. The camp was deactivated that August, and no trace of its barracks and stables remains.

Jefferson Parish, LA

In 1862 Confederate and Louisiana authorities laid out Camp Parapet as part of the northern defenses of New Orleans, expecting an attack from upriver. Instead the city fell to a Union fleet coming up from the Gulf, and the fortifications passed into Federal hands, serving as a Northern training camp for the rest of the war.

Baird, TX

Established in 1862, Camp Pecan was one of a chain of posts set a day's horseback ride apart, manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment to guard the state's western line of settlement during the Civil War. With few men and chronic shortages of food, clothing, and horses, its Confederates faced Indian raids from the west and renegades and deserters from the east. Against these odds they managed to hold the frontier, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to them in 1963.

Eagle Pass, TX

During the Civil War, Camp Rabb was one of eighteen Confederate outposts strung a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, meant to guard against both Indian raids and Federal invasion. Named for a captain in the Frontier Regiment of Texas Cavalry, it watched a ford on the Cotton Road, the vital route by which Southern cotton reached market. Nearby Fort Duncan, a former U.S. post, protected that lifeline trade of cotton for arms and supplies against Union forces upriver.

Floresville, TX

West of present Floresville lay some of the richest cattle country of the great trail-driving era, where small herds were gathered into large ones bound north. The land traced back to Mission Espada's 1731 Rancho de Las Cabras before John F. Camp bought and built it up in 1874; by 1904 developers had carved his 10,000-acre spread into farm tracts, and twenty families formed the Camp Ranch community with a school, cemetery, shooting club, and Charley Boening's store. Most traces are gone, but Evergreen Cemetery still marks where the community stood.

South Plains, TX

In 1841 Republic of Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar dispatched merchants and a military escort toward Santa Fe, hoping to open a trade route and extend Texas's jurisdiction. Near here, exhausted and low on provisions and harried by Kiowa raiders, commander Hugh McLeod drew up the resolution — splitting his command — that gave this campsite its name; the expedition ended in captivity in Mexico City.

Pymatuning Township, PA · est. 1994

From 1942 to 1945 this 3,300-acre tract in Mercer County was a vast U.S. Army staging base — first the Shenango Personnel Replacement Depot, renamed Camp Reynolds in 1943 — through which roughly a million soldiers passed on their way to the war, most bound for Europe. At its peak 75,000 troops were housed here at once, and racial tensions among them boiled over in July 1943. The camp also held more than 1,800 German prisoners of war.

McMullen County, TX

During the Civil War, Camp Rio Frio was a home-guard post buffering older settlements from Apache raids and bandits, manned by scattered local men of the 29th Brigade, Texas Militia. They lived in dirt-floored picket homes and made do with prickly-pear salad, Spanish dagger blooms, hominy, and wild game, wearing homespun dyed blue with Brazil root or gold with agarita. The camp later became Dogtown and finally the town of Tilden.

Chattanooga, TN

Near the mouth of Chattanooga Creek, where the Tennessee River loops around Moccasin Bend, this site served as a supply base for Tennessee troops during the Creek War of 1812–13. That conflict, fought largely against the Red Stick faction of the Creek Nation, unfolded alongside the War of 1812 and drew militia and volunteers deep into the Southern frontier. The river's dramatic bend here made it a natural staging ground as forces moved through the mountains.

Eastland, TX

During the Civil War, Camp Salmon was one link in a chain of Confederate posts set a day's horseback ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, manned by the Texas Frontier Regiment to guard settlers against raids. Named for post commander Capt. John Salmon and later renamed Camp McCord, its men served short of food, ammunition, and horses, far from the war's celebrated battlefields. Their duty was to hold a 2,000-mile line of frontier and coast for a Confederacy that leaned heavily on Texas for supply.

San Augustine, TX

During World War II, the U.S. government spread hundreds of prisoner-of-war camps across the country, often at the urging of towns hungry for federal spending and short of workers with so many men in uniform. Opened in 1944 as a branch of Camp Fannin, this East Texas camp first held soldiers captured from Germany's Afrika Korps, who labored in the region's pine forests. It outlasted every other branch camp in the area, becoming a gathering point for prisoners awaiting repatriation before it finally closed in 1946.

Kingsville, TX

On San Fernando Creek stood a Confederate post guarding the "cotton road," the vital smuggling and trade route that ran from East Texas to the Rio Grande, keeping the blockaded South supplied. Manned from 1862 and reinforced in 1864 under the famed Colonel John S. "RIP" Ford, the camp anchored a network of cavalry commands — including Tejano units under Santos Benavides and home guards that counted King Ranch founder Richard King — who skirmished with Federal forces across South Texas. From here Ford's "Cavalry of the West" watched the cotton road and pressed the fight toward the Rio Grande Valley.

Corpus Christi, TX

For decades after 1848 the Rio Grande border saw smuggling, rustling, and armed raids, and the Mexican Revolution sharpened fears of attack — especially after Pancho Villa's 1916 raid into New Mexico. Corpus Christi officials, hoping to boost the economy, lobbied to host troops, and in August 1916 General Frederick Funston ordered infantry and the Texas Brigade headquarters to a 200-acre camp named for General Thomas Scurry. Its soldiers drilled under strict routine — and fielded a football team that outscored rivals 432 to 6 — before the site was reactivated to train troops when the U.S. entered World War I.

Springettsbury Township, PA · est. 2008

As the Revolution wound toward victory, the American army needed somewhere to hold the enemies it had captured, and in 1781 York County became that place. Camp Security, a stockade ringed by log huts, detained British soldiers surrendered by General Burgoyne at Saratoga, later joined by prisoners taken at Yorktown, along with their families. Guarded by local militia and Continental troops, it operated until the war's end in 1783; archaeologists later confirmed its location just south of here.

Cooper, TX

The land around Camp Shed Cemetery, near the North Sulphur River, was home to the Caddo before Euro-American settlers began arriving in 1836, and many early migrants used the spot as a campground on their way west. Serving the communities of Enloe and Mount Joy, the ground saw its first recorded burial — Johnnie Kerbow — in 1880 and was formally deeded in 1886, when it was still called the "Campstead" graveyard after a camp shed that once stood there. Veterans of the Civil War and both world wars rest among its graves.

Hempstead, TX

In the anxious spring of 1836, as Santa Anna's forces pressed eastward, the Texas Army camped near this point from March 31 to April 13. Here the troops crossed the rain-swollen Brazos River aboard the steamboat Yellow Stone before turning toward Harrisburg. Within weeks that march would end in the stunning victory at San Jacinto that secured Texas independence.

Stark, NH

In the spring of 1944, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp tucked into the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire took on a strange new life. Ringed by a high fence and four guard towers, it became the only World War II prisoner of war camp in the state, holding roughly 250 German and Austrian soldiers—many taken during the fighting in North Africa. Like thousands of POWs held across the wartime United States, the men at Stark were put to work, cutting pulpwood in the surrounding forests to relieve a wartime labor shortage. Over months of shared labor, wary captors and captives in this remote mountain town formed unexpected human bonds that residents remembered long after the war.

Holliday, TX

In 1898 the United Confederate Veterans of Archer County purchased 106 acres as reunion grounds, naming the camp for the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. For nearly four decades, until 1935, aging veterans and their families gathered here each year for three-day reunions that drew some five hundred people. Alongside the memories and speeches came ball games, dancing, contests, shows, and rodeos.

Elgin, TX

During World War II, rural Bastrop County was transformed almost overnight by Camp Swift, a sprawling 56,000-acre installation that trained some 300,000 soldiers. Several infantry divisions and the famed 10th Mountain Division trained on its grounds, and the self-contained 'city' also held thousands of German prisoners of war and ran the only combat nurse-training program in Texas. After the war it became a demobilization center before closing in 1946.

Gilmer, TX

This site marks a Civil War recruiting camp, one of the gathering points where Texas raised men for Confederate service during the conflict. Such camps were the first stop for volunteers and conscripts, where recruits were mustered, organized into companies, and sent on toward the front. They were a common but often short-lived feature of the wartime landscape across the state.

Marietta, OH

When the Civil War called Ohio's men to arms, this ground near Marietta became Camp Tucker, a mustering and training campground for Union troops. It took its name in honor of Benjamin Tupper, a Revolutionary War brigadier general who had helped organize the Ohio Company and stood among Marietta's first settlers in 1788. The site links two chapters of American service — the founding of the frontier settlement and the fight to preserve the Union three generations later.

Camp Verde, TX

Camp Verde grew up around a U.S. Army post established in the 1850s in the Texas Hill Country, best remembered as headquarters of the War Department's remarkable experiment in using camels for desert transport. The barracks here housed soldiers stationed on this frontier outpost in the years around the Civil War. Though the inscription bears only a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark medallion, the site anchors one of the more unusual chapters of the antebellum army.

Camp Verde, TX

This mercantile business opened in 1857 as the Williams Community Store, serving trade around the Camp Verde Army Post—headquarters of the War Department's famous 1857–69 experiment in using camels for military transport across the Southwest. A post office followed in 1887. The store links everyday frontier commerce to one of the most curious ventures in U.S. Army history.

Victoria, TX

After the Texas victory at San Jacinto in April 1836, Gen. Thomas J. Rusk led some 300 troops to a camp on Spring Creek near the town of Victoria, abandoned during the Runaway Scrape. Here Rusk received the famous 'Whiphandle Dispatch,' a warning of a possible Mexican counterattack smuggled in the handle of a whip, and appealed to the U.S. Army for help. Reinforcements swelled Camp Victoria to more than 2,500 men — the largest Texan force of the Revolution — but the feared invasion never came, and command passed through Lamar and Huston amid a restless, mutinous army.

Hitchcock, TX

As the United States mobilized for World War II, the government acquired more than 3,300 acres between Hitchcock and Alta Loma and built Camp Wallace, named for World War I Colonel Elmer J. Wallace. Construction began in November 1940, and by May 1941 the sprawling installation of nearly 400 buildings housed over 10,000 people for military training. Over the war it also held German prisoners of war, passed to naval control in 1945 as a veterans' separation center, and even aided relief after the 1947 Texas City disaster before being declared surplus.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 1999

Established in 1863 in Cheltenham Township, Camp William Penn was Pennsylvania's only training camp for African American soldiers and the largest of eighteen such camps in the nation. Over 10,000 men in eleven regiments of United States Colored Troops trained here before shipping out to fight in Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, and beyond; the camp closed in August 1865 as the war ended.

Town of Ramapo, NY

During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps put hundreds of thousands of young men to work restoring America's forests, parks, and trails. This marker recalls CCC Company 201's Camp-18 at Pine Meadow, one of the camps whose enrollees built the roads, trails, and facilities still used in the region's parklands.