Fort Belvoir, Engineers on the Potomac
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Virginia
The land here had an odd origin story. The District of Columbia purchased fifteen hundred acres from the Otterback family in nineteen ten, intending to build a prison. Local opposition killed the plan. The War Department took the property in nineteen twelve, and Army engineer troops established a rifle range and training camp in nineteen fifteen.
The camp grew fast during the First World War, renamed Camp A.A. Humphreys in December nineteen seventeen as the Corps of Engineers built a major training installation through an unusually brutal winter. By nineteen nineteen, it had become the permanent home of the Army Engineer School. It was renamed Fort Humphreys in nineteen twenty-two for permanent status, then redesignated Fort Belvoir in nineteen thirty-five to acknowledge the colonial plantation that had once occupied the site. For seven decades the Engineer School trained more than seven hundred thousand soldiers here before relocating in nineteen eighty-eight.
