Camp Fannin: When Tyler Trained Two Hundred Thousand Soldiers

Between Tyler and Kilgore, on ground that is now largely commercial and residential, the federal government built one of the largest infantry training installations in the American South during the Second World War. Camp Fannin was named for Colonel James Walker Fannin, the Texas Revolutionary War commander who died at Goliad in eighteen thirty-six, and over the four years of its operation, it processed a staggering number of American soldiers. Construction began December first, nineteen forty-two.

The camp activated on May twenty-ninth, nineteen forty-three, and by June the first trainees were arriving. At peak operation, Camp Fannin held a troop capacity of eighteen thousand six hundred and eighty soldiers, with more than a thousand hospital beds. Over its full lifetime, the camp trained more than two hundred thousand United States soldiers for infantry combat.

In the critical years of the European and Pacific theaters, that number was not a statistic but a lifeline. Camp Fannin also served as a prisoner-of-war facility, housing German POWs during the war years. After Germany's surrender in nineteen forty-five, the camp converted to a separation center for discharging returning veterans.

It closed in nineteen forty-six. The military hospital that remained after the camp closed became the East Texas Tuberculosis Sanatorium, and in later decades was transformed into the University of Texas Health Center at Tyler. The institution that began as a wartime barracks became a regional medical anchor, which is something Tyler does quietly well: find new purpose in what the past leaves behind.