Way Back Wednesday in Calhoun County---May 16-22

Armed Forces Day was created in August 1949 by order of President Harry Truman to honor the men and women in military service. The first Armed Forces Day for all branches of the military was celebrated on the Third Saturday of May in 1950. Calhoun County, Alabama has a long history of hosting the U.S. Military since the earliest days of the county’s existence. In addition, young men (and later women) from Calhoun County volunteered to serve their country from the Mexican War to the present. The military found the county hospitable for training troops for the 19th and 20th Centuries wars.

The earliest known military use for the land in Calhoun County was three iron works furnaces to create munitions for the Confederate States of America. Those furnaces were destroyed in raids by Union Army forces in 1864 and 1865. The South was destroyed and had to rebuilt at the end of the Civil War. The next time the U.S. Military came to Calhoun County was to train troops for the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th Century.

Since Mobile, Alabama, was the port of departure for deployment to fight in Cuba, Calhoun County was a logical place to quarter troops. Camp Shipp, a temporary camp, was established north of Anniston in Blue Mountain in the summer of 1898. The camp lasted less than a year before it was disbanded. Col. W. H. McKleroy, an Anniston resident and local lawyer, was responsible for the military establishing the camp at Anniston. The main military post was located at Union Hill near Seventeenth Street and Clydesdale Avenue.

Camp Shipp was the U.S. Army’s first experience training in Calhoun County but it would not be the last. In the earliest days of Anniston, two National Guard Units were established: the Anniston Rifles and the Woodstock Guards. The Army selected Calhoun County to serve as the site for the Southern States Maneuvers in the summer of 1912. Camp Pettus, under the command of Col. John T. VanOrsdale, was a temporary camp established north of Anniston near the site of the old Camp Shipp. The camp was summer camp to train National Guard Units from around the Southeastern United States. The military took notice of the hospitable weather and people so a decision to establish a permanent training camp near the town of Anniston was made in 1917.

America’s entrance into World War I hastened the U.S. Army establishing Camp McClellan to train troops to send overseas to fight. The owners of the land had already planted crops for the year so the citizens of Anniston paid the costs of the crops to get the farmers to move off the land so the military could take custody of the land to start building a training camp. The families that owned the land that became Fort McClellan moved to farms in the Alexandria and Leatherwood areas of Calhoun County. Some of the decedents of the land owners that were displaced still live in the Calhoun County area.

The construction of the military camp commenced in the summer of 1917 and was completed in time to train National Guard troops being sent to the front lines in France in 1918. By 1929, the Camp McClellan was made a permanent Regular Army post and designated as a fort. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of troops were trained at Fort McClellan.

In the post-World War II era, the fort’s future was in doubt; but, by the mid-1950s, the training area became home to the Women’s Army Corp, the Chemical Corp, and later the Military Police. The fort survived through much of the 20th Century and was a great partner with the cities in Calhoun County until the Base Realignment and Closure Commission decided to close the post in 1995. By 1999, Fort McClellan was decommissioned and much of the land was returned to the city of Anniston and Calhoun County while a small portion of the fort remained as a National Guard Training Center. The Fort McClellan National Guard Training Center celebrated the 100th Anniversary of Fort McClellan in 2017.

To learn more about the history of Calhoun County pick up a copy of Images of America: Calhoun County (ISBN 978-0738589985), Anniston (ISBN 978-0738506012), or Anniston Revisited (ISBN 978-1467114752) by Kimberly O’Dell.