Beginnings
In late 1941, as war drew closer to America’s shores, a team of Army surveyors visited the site of a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp near the small rural town of Blackstone, Virginia. There they found enough land, water and other resources needed to establish a post large enough to simultaneously train more than one infantry division. The site also offered easy railroad access to both mountain and coastal training sites. By December, 1941, 45,867 acres (185.62 km2) of land in Nottoway, Dinwiddie, Lunenburg and Brunswick Counties were acquired and cleared to prepare for construction of the first buildings.
Elements of the Virginia National Guard had their first taste of what is now Fort Pickett on Dec. 6-7 when the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, camped here on the way back to its home station at Fort Meade, Maryland, having completed a series of war games in North Carolina.
Read more about this topic: Fort Pickett
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)