Fort Lewis: The Gift That Built an Army Post
Near Tacoma, Washington
When the United States entered World War One in nineteen seventeen, the Army needed to build training camps fast. Congress authorized sixteen cantonments across the country. Pierce County, Washington did something none of the other sites did: the citizens of Tacoma voted a two-million-dollar bond, bought seventy thousand acres of cutover timber land south of the city, and donated it outright to the federal government. It was the first time in American history that a local community had purchased land and given it to the Army to build a permanent military post.
The camp was named Camp Lewis, after Meriwether Lewis of the Corps of Discovery. It stood apart from the other cantonments in scale and relative isolation, earning a reputation as the cantonment of the Wild West. Soldiers who trained here deployed to Europe and to the Pacific. After the war, the installation was redesignated Fort Lewis in nineteen twenty-seven.
In nineteen forty, the year before Pearl Harbor, a colonel named Dwight Eisenhower served at Fort Lewis, one of his last postings before the war transformed him into the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, and later the thirty-fourth president of the United States.
Through World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, and both Gulf Wars, Fort Lewis remained one of the Army's most important bases on the Pacific Rim, a staging point for forces deploying across the Pacific and Middle East. In twenty ten, Fort Lewis merged with adjacent McChord Air Force Base to become Joint Base Lewis-McChord, one of the largest joint military installations in the country, with more than sixty thousand service members, dependents, and civilian employees.
The seventy thousand acres the citizens of Tacoma gave away in nineteen seventeen are still in use, still training soldiers, still sending them overseas.
