Fort Benning and the Infantry School

In nineteen eighteen, with the Great War still grinding in France, the United States Army was looking for a new home for its Infantry School. The school needed terrain that allowed realistic field training, rolling ground, rivers, woods, and weather mild enough to train year-round. It needed space. And it needed a community willing to support it.

Columbus civic leaders, learning that their city was under consideration, organized what any honest history would call a lobbying campaign. The community committed to purchasing the land, nearly ninety-seven thousand acres across Chattahoochee and Muscogee Counties, and transferring it to the federal government at nominal cost. The decision was made in nineteen nineteen. Camp Benning was established on October nineteenth, nineteen eighteen, just weeks before the Armistice, and made permanent as Fort Benning in nineteen twenty-two.

The fort was named for Henry L. Benning, a Confederate brigadier general and Columbus native who had served at Antietam and Gettysburg. That name stood for over a century. In twenty twenty-three, as part of a congressionally mandated removal of Confederate names from military installations, the post was redesignated Fort Moore, honoring General Harold G. Moore and his wife Julia Compton Moore. General Moore commanded the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Ia Drang in nineteen sixty-five, the first major engagement between American and North Vietnamese forces, documented in his book and later the film We Were Soldiers. The name change was reversed in twenty twenty-five by the Defense Department, returning the post to Fort Benning under a different rationale.

The Infantry School that grew up here became the primary training ground for every Army infantryman and paratrooper in the United States, and for officers from dozens of allied nations. Generations of commanders who shaped American military history, including George S. Patton and Omar Bradley, had assignments here. The post today covers approximately one hundred and eighty-two thousand acres and employs over one hundred thousand soldiers and civilians.

It has been the economic anchor of Columbus since nineteen nineteen. The city and the fort have grown together, each dependent on the other in ways that have defined the character of both.