Fort Ord and the Town That Outlived the Army

A few miles northwest of Salinas, where the coastal scrubland meets the dunes above Monterey Bay, the United States Army occupied forty-five square miles of California land for most of the twentieth century. Fort Ord was established as a maneuver area in nineteen seventeen and formally designated a fort in nineteen forty. At its peak, during World War Two and the Korean War, it housed up to fifty thousand troops. For the surrounding communities, including Salinas, Fort Ord was simultaneously a neighbor, an employer, an economy, and a presence so large it was simply part of the landscape.

The fort operated as a basic training center from nineteen forty-seven until nineteen seventy-five, cycling hundreds of thousands of American soldiers through Monterey County. The Seventh Infantry Division, deactivated in nineteen ninety-four, was the last major unit to call it home.

In nineteen ninety-one the Base Realignment and Closure process selected Fort Ord for closure. The post officially closed in September of nineteen ninety-four. It was the largest military base closed in that round of realignment, and when the Army walked out the door it left behind a landscape with significant environmental problems. Fort Ord was placed on the National Priorities List as a Superfund site, one of the most contaminated in the country. The specific concerns included unexploded ordnance buried across thousands of acres, leaking underground storage tanks, groundwater contaminated with solvents, and numerous illegal dump sites.

What happened after the closure is unusual. Rather than the slow blight that followed many base closures, the Fort Ord land was redistributed to multiple public uses. Most of it became the Fort Ord National Monument, managed by the Bureau of Land Management as open space and trail land. The former military housing and administrative area became California State University Monterey Bay, which opened in nineteen ninety-four on the base footprint, giving the Central Coast a public university that had not existed before the Army left.

The cleanup of the ordnance fields is ongoing decades later. Hikers on the Fort Ord National Monument trails are still advised to stay on marked paths and report any suspicious metal objects. The Army shaped this landscape, and the Army's departure did not entirely undo that. The dunes and the scrub oak and the coastal fog are there regardless. They were there before the Army came and they will be there when the cleanup is done.