History
Land for the fort was purchased in 1940 from William Randolph Hearst (Hearst Castle is down the coast), and from adjacent landowners. This surrounded the small unincorporated town of Jolon, which remains today in a significantly diminished form from its heyday.
Fort Hunter Liggett was under the authority of Camp Roberts, California, to the southeast, until 1952, when it became a sub-installation of Fort Ord on the Monterey Peninsula. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, the base served two purposes: as a training area for the 7th Light Infantry Division (based at Fort Ord), and as the home for the USACDEC (usually abbreviated as CDEC and later as TEC, the Training and Experimentation Command). The mission of CDEC was to evaluate new Army and Marine Corps weapons systems by providing a simulated Soviet Mechanized Rifle Company to act as the "OPFOR", or opposing forces. By this method, the Sergeant York Air Defense Gun was found to have serious flaws, while the Marine's LAV vehicle was validated. In 1993, in preparation of the closure of Fort Ord due to BRAC 1991, Hunter Liggett was transferred to the Army Reserves, which in turn made it a sub-installation of Fort McCoy, Wisconsin in 1995. Since 2003 FHL has managed Camp Parks and Army units and housing that remain at former NAS Moffett Field.
Read more about this topic: Fort Hunter Liggett
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“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)