History
The base was founded during World War I as Camp A. A. Humphreys, named for Andrew A. Humphreys. The post was renamed Fort Belvoir in the 1930s in recognition of the Belvoir plantation that once occupied the site, but the adjacent United States Army Corps of Engineers Humphreys Engineer Center retains part of the original namesake.
Fort Belvoir was initially the home of the Army Engineer School prior to its relocation in the 1980s to Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. It was also the home of the United States Army Engineer Research and Development Laboratory.
As a result of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission, Fort Belvoir had a substantial increase in the number of people stationed or employed there. All major Washington, DC-area NGA facilities, including those in Bethesda, MD; Reston, VA; and Washington, DC were consolidated at a new facility, the NGA Campus East, situated on the former Engineer Proving Ground site. The cost of the new center was $2.4 billion.
Read more about this topic: Fort Belvoir
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
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—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)