Mountain Home: Desert Air Base on the High Plain

Mountain Home sits in a stretch of southern Idaho so remote and flat that the military found it ideal. Construction of a new airfield twelve miles southwest of town began in November of nineteen forty-two. The base opened the following August as a B-twenty-four Liberator training facility, preparing bomber crews for the Pacific theater.

After the war the base cycled through closures and reactivations before being permanently established as Mountain Home Air Force Base in nineteen sixty-six. Today it is home to the Three Hundred Sixty-Sixth Fighter Wing and remains a major employer in Elmore County. The town itself grew up around the Snake River Plain cattle trade in the eighteen eighties, after the Oregon Short Line railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-three and the old stage stop moved down beside the tracks, with accounts differing on who chose the name Mountain Home.

The Air Force transformed it from a quiet ranching stop into one of the more strategically important installations in the American West.