Camp Bragg and the Making of the Modern Army

In the summer of nineteen eighteen, with the United States in the middle of World War One, an Army officer named William Snow, the Chief of Field Artillery, stopped in a small town in North Carolina he had never heard of. He was looking for land to train artillery.

The rolling hills and tall longleaf pines northwest of Fayetteville impressed him. The Army acquired more than one hundred thousand acres. By September nineteenth eighteen, Camp Bragg was established, and construction contracts worth about six million dollars had been signed. The camp was named for Braxton Bragg, a North Carolina native who had served as a general in the Mexican-American War and, controversially, as a Confederate general in the Civil War.

Camp Bragg became Fort Bragg in nineteen twenty-two, a permanent installation. After World War Two, the Eighty-Second Airborne Division made it home, along with units that would eventually become Delta Force and various special operations commands. At its peak, Fort Bragg was the largest military installation in the world by population.

For a century, the post and the city of Fayetteville existed in an unusual relationship: economically intertwined, culturally distinct, often in tension. The base brought prosperity and also strain. Fayetteville developed a reputation, sometimes unfair, for the rough edges that shadow any garrison town.

The name of the installation changed twice in recent years. In twenty twenty-three, the Army renamed it Fort Liberty, removing the Confederate general's name. Then in February twenty twenty-five, it was renamed again, this time Fort Bragg, but in honor of Roland Bragg, a World War Two paratrooper who fought at the Battle of the Bulge, not the Confederate general.

The debate about what to call the base reflected a broader national argument about memory, honor, and what the Army chooses to celebrate.