Butner: The Instant Army City
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
In nineteen forty-two, the United States Army needed a training base fast. In just four and a half months, workers threw up eighteen hundred buildings, sixty-five miles of paved streets, and a hundred and eleven miles of water and sewer lines on forty thousand acres of Granville County farmland. The result was Camp Butner, named for North Carolina general Henry Wolfe Butner, a World War One artillery commander.
Nearly thirty thousand soldiers trained here for the European and Pacific theaters. By nineteen forty-three the camp also held roughly three thousand Italian and German prisoners of war. When the war ended, the Army packed up and left.
North Carolina took over the land in nineteen forty-seven and converted the abandoned hospital wards into what became John Umstead Hospital and the Murdoch Center. The instant army city became an enduring home for behavioral health and, later, a federal prison complex that still operates today.
