Fort Carson
Near Colorado Springs, Colorado
The sprawling military installation south of Colorado Springs was born in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. Colorado Springs purchased land and donated it to the War Department in late nineteen forty-one, and construction crews broke ground in January of nineteen forty-two. At the peak of construction, nearly eleven thousand five hundred workers were on site, building facilities for more than thirty-five thousand soldiers.
The camp was named for Kit Carson, the frontier scout who explored much of the West in the eighteen hundreds. During World War Two, over one hundred thousand soldiers trained here, and at one point the camp held nine thousand Axis prisoners of war, mostly Italian and German, who were hired out to farms and ranches across the region. In nineteen fifty-four the installation was elevated to fort status.
Today Fort Carson covers two hundred fourteen square miles and is one of the Army's largest installations.
