Fort Indiantown Gap: Pennsylvania's Training Ground

When the Pennsylvania National Guard needed room to grow, it found it here in a valley between Blue Mountain and Second Mountain, in Lebanon and Dauphin counties. The state began buying land for a new training reservation in nineteen thirty-one, conducting first exercises in nineteen thirty-two. By nineteen forty the installation was complete, covering roughly eighteen thousand acres.

Then the federal government leased it. In the weeks after September nineteen forty, thirteen thousand workers erected more than fourteen hundred buildings in a furious rush. By the time World War Two ended, more than one hundred fifty thousand troops in eight Army divisions had trained here before shipping overseas. The post later served twice as a refugee resettlement camp, housing Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in nineteen seventy-five and Cuban arrivals in nineteen eighty. Today Fort Indiantown Gap remains Pennsylvania's principal National Guard installation.