I know we have driven on this road before, but it had been quite sometime.
At WWII Camp Howze (north of Gainesville), the concrete piers are all that remain. However, dang at least that is what I had recalled.
Then we started to see the remains of buildings. Maybe it just took me adding two and two together to realize what they were. 🙂
After doing some online searching, I found a photo that said this long skinny building might have been a long corridor of the hospital.
There were multiple of this type of buildings in the field. The camp was a whole city worth of buildings to accommodate those 30,000 soldiers and support personnel.
Of course the concrete piers were the most numerous of the remnants of the camp.
The 59,000 acres camp was built in 1942. Three hundred farmers were forced to give up their land. Its main purpose was a training facility for 30,000 soldiers. However almost 3,000 German POW were incarcerated there too. In the fall of 1946, the camp was torn down. Then the land was offered back to farmers. The Santa Fe Depot Morton Museum of Cooke County has a short history of the camp. The current Gainesville airport was once part of the airfield at the camp. One former POW actually came back to see the camp, Wolf Weber. Another account from a American was they the soldiers were marching and POWs were out playing soccer. Seemed a little unfair to the soldier.
The red arrow points to where I took the hospital corridor photo. Interesting enough you can still see what appears to roads on the Google imagery. If you zoom in on the map you will be able to other nearby areas that are still scarred by the camp.
That’s very interesting! And I didn’t remember the camp was so huge.
I never heard of that WWII camp. It was a large camp and lots of soldiers and prisoners.
Aren’t ants fun.
You can really see the extent of building “ghosts” in that aerial photo – pretty extensive development. Nice research into the history of the camp.