Landing Camp Pike: War Brought Unusual Opportunity

On an expedited timetable set by war, Camp Pike in Pulaski County quickly developed into the second most populous community in Arkansas. Its peak roll call of 54,463 in September 1918 was reached 15 months after construction began. Only Little Rock, with 58,000 citizens, was larger.

(Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of business history feature stories. Suggestions for future Fifth Monday articles are welcome. Please contact Gwen Moritz at GMoritz@ABPG.com.)

America’s entry into the First World War set the stage for a historic economic development opportunity that business leaders in Little Rock seized back in the spring of 1917.

A coast-to-coast competition was launched with Uncle Sam’s call for sites to establish 32 cantonments, military posts to house, train and support the creation of a million-man National Army that would grow to four times that.

Boosters operating through an early incarnation of the Little Rock Regional Chamber didn’t hesitate to go over the top, intent on capturing one of those posts.

Their aggressive effort was rewarded on June 11 when the War Department selected a 13,000-acre patch of woods and pastures in north Pulaski County to build Camp Pike.

In the months that followed, Camp Pike effectively became the second-largest city in Arkansas with a peak population that topped 54,000 in September 1918. Only Little Rock’s 58,000 surpassed the cantonment census.

Fueled by a heady mix of patriotic fervor and capitalistic zeal, local business leaders set out to land a military camp that wouldn’t fold up tents and fade away when the shooting in Europe stopped.

They envisioned securing an Army installation as a commerce generator that would remain after war gave way to peace. They went after it much the way communities pursue industrial prospects.

The legacy of that successful recruiting venture is today’s Camp Robinson, which contributes an estimated $700 million annually to the central Arkansas economy.

The sprawling 33,000-acre training grounds of the Arkansas National Guard in Pulaski and Faulkner counties started a century ago with Camp Pike.

The 1917 base was part of the nation’s $3 billion commitment to expand the Army and field a million troops to fight alongside England and France in the Great War. (That’s $63 billion in today’s dollars, a modern reflection of the breathtaking sum from 100 years ago.)

Urgency was the order of the day with only a small foundation of the U.S. Army’s 127,151 soldiers and 181,620 National Guardsmen to build on.

News accounts at the time indicate efforts to land a local cantonment began mere days after America declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Leading the first wave was George Firmin, general manager of the Little Rock Board of Commerce.

Firmin is credited with originating the idea of going after a divisional cantonment as part of an after-action report published in the Arkansas Gazette on June 12, 1917.

His first foray toward that objective was traveling to San Antonio, where he met on April 10 with a top-echelon military decision-maker: Gen. John Pershing.

The timing of those early talks proved to be especially advantageous, what with Pershing on the brink of being named commander of the American Expeditionary Force to oversee the forming and training of the National Army and leading its combat deployment in Europe.

Firmin’s meeting with Pershing was the first in a series of face-to-face networking moves where he and other boosters would show the military what the Little Rock area had to offer.

Among the selling points of the Pulaski County site was its proximity to the Army’s existing Fort Roots complex, the transportation crossroads presented by the local rail network and Little Rock, 7 miles to the southeast.

The San Antonio visit and subsequent meetings with military officials in Charleston, South Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Washington, D.C., also served as reconnaissance missions to learn more details on what the Army was looking for in a location. The intel they gathered allowed Little Rock boosters to refine their proposal into a winner.

Among the challenges along the way were ample hydration and alleviating malaria concerns.

The logistics of supplying water for the camp were worked out by augmenting available sources with a new well capable of delivering a daily flow of 1.2 million gallons.

The Little Rock Board of Commerce offered $50,000 to pay for mosquito eradication in and around the proposed campsite, along with the gift of 3,000 acres to build on and a prepaid lease on 10,000 acres for the duration of the war.

“We feel that this offer, coupled with the transportation facilities of Little Rock, the advantages of the National Forest Reserve and the splendid cooperative spirit of our citizens turned the scale in our favor,” said W.B. Smith, president of the Little Rock Board of Commerce.

“Apart from the material benefit to the city and the state from the location of a training camp here for 30,000 to 60,000 soldiers, we should deem it a special privilege to have an opportunity to cooperate with the government in the training of soldiers for foreign service, and in contributing in this way, personally, to the conduct of the war.

“It would be impossible and unfair to single out any citizen and mention him especially for the work performed in connection with the obtaining of the camp site location.

“There was such a splendid cooperation of all our citizens, both in contribution of time and money, that it may be truly said that Little Rock has already reaped the benefit of this effort, as it has brought our citizens closer together in public matters than ever before in the history of Little Rock.”

Entrance to Camp Pike

Division headquarters

Barracks at South Avenue entrance

Training Talk
Camp Pike was its own literal boom town with the crack of bolt-action rifle fire, the rat-a-tat-tat staccato of machine guns sending bullets down range, the blast of grenades, all crowned by the rumble of artillery rounds sent tearing through the sky to earth-shattering impact.

Combat training included bayonet runs, horsemanship and chemical warfare defense. The proper use of a gas mask, prompted by the introduction of poisonous gas on the World War I battlefield, was a new addition to basic training.

Portions of the Camp Pike landscape were transformed into mock battlefields with trenchworks and shell craters. Military advisors from France helped oversee training to assure authenticity.

Raymond Screws, director of the Arkansas National Guard Museum, came across a gem that he mentioned during a World War I seminar in August held at the Old State House in downtown Little Rock.

“The Signal Corp experimented and trained in several methods to send messages, including homing pigeons. Training took place in the northwest area of the cantonment with signs that said keep out.

Eighteen soldiers trained at the Field Battalion Headquarters of the 312th Signal Corp. Most of the birds came from Boston area.

Trench and Camp, the post newspaper, revealed that anyone caught shooting a U.S. homing pigeon would be fined $100 and be sentenced to six months in prison.”

The Lady Wins
Toward the end of the selection process, at least five other communities were competing for the regional prize: Fort Smith; Hattiesburg and Holly Springs in Mississippi; and Alexandria and Shreveport in Louisiana. A last-minute entry by Memphis prompted a serious bout of concern, but that effort didn’t make the cut.

The news that Little Rock had submitted a winning bid was first heralded on June 11 in a brief, enigmatic telegram message from Washington: “The lady wins. Congratulations.”

The pre-arranged coded communique was sent by Albert Cohn, president of Little Rock’s M.M. Cohn Co. and a former engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, to Smith, president of the Little Rock Board of Commerce.

The veiled good news quickly became public after official sources began spreading the word.

Firmin, Cohn and Smith were members of the Little Rock Board of Commerce’s Committee on Military Affairs tasked with leading the charge for the cantonment.

Additional members of the committee included Lloyd England, Moorhead Wright, C.K. Lincoln, J.S. Speed, H.L. Remmel, D.K. Hawthorne and C.J. Griffith.

Others in the forefront of the Camp Pike effort were Ed Cornish, W.W. Dickinson, Herman Kahn, W.L. Hemingway and Dr. C.W. Garrison.

A hush-hush local fundraising effort had already gathered $233,000 to assemble land and get the project rolling by the time the selection was announced. The war chest would top out at $325,000 as stock in the Arkansas Post Development Co. was sold at $25 per share.

Before an invasion of thousands of soldiers came an invasion of thousands of civilians to build the camp and hundreds of teams of horses and mules to haul the raw materials needed for construction.

From the Arkansas State Archives: “Building the camp required a sizeable labor force, which meant recruiting workers not just from around the state but also from other parts of the country, as well. In June, workers began to arrive at Camp Pike.

“The labor force in the camp peaked at 9,734 workers. The largest challenge presented to those overseeing construction was the frequent labor turnover in the camp due to men being drafted into the Army or choosing to return home to work their farms.

“Preliminary plans for the camp proposed 1,653 separate buildings, including a 77-building hospital complex. Work began the week of June 18, 1917. Construction crews began feverishly building at a breakneck pace. They completed the first building, an officer’s quarters, on June 29, 1917.”

The Missouri Pacific Railroad Co. laid track for a 5-mile spur line to connect the camp with its existing network under the promise of a three-week delivery schedule.

More than 32 million board feet of lumber flowed in to build the camp along with more than 50 miles of pipe to supply water.

When construction was going full tilt, trains were delivering as many as 100 cars of lumber daily as the main contractor raced to meet a 90-day deadline to complete 1,110 buildings.

James Stewart & Co. of St. Louis and New York was the general contractor, overseeing a weekly payroll of more than $300,000. Design was handled by Black & Veatch Architects-Engineers of Kansas City, Missouri.

The Arkansas workforce was augmented by an estimated 1,500 workers from Puerto Rico and 3,000 from Texas and Oklahoma.

 John Fordyce

Overseeing the work for the military as construction quartermaster was Maj. John Fordyce, whose family was synonymous with the namesake bathhouse in Hot Springs as well as the development of that city’s Eastman Hotel and Arlington Hotel.

The build-out of Camp Pike was deemed substantially complete by November, but construction work continued into the summer of 1918.

Zebulon Pike

Naming Names
The War Department chose names for the 32 new cantonments based on military folk linked with the location. Camp Pike was named for Zebulon Pike, who traveled through Arkansas as part of his exploration of the Louisiana Purchase.

General Pike was killed in Canada in the War of 1812 during an assault of what today is Toronto.

Camp Pike became Camp Robinson in 1937 after the federal government transferred ownership to the state. The new name was chosen to honor the late Sen. Joe. T. Robinson.

Estimated to cost $3.5 million, Camp Pike ended up ballooning to a $13 million project, according to later news accounts.

Thousands of recruits and draftees began arriving after Labor Day 1917. Where did all the doughboys come from during the camp’s 14 months of wartime service?

Headcount estimates by the Army list six states as the biggest contributors of manpower that flowed through Camp Pike: Arkansas, 38,734; Louisiana, 15,733; Mississippi, 13,094; Missouri, 13,035; Iowa, 12,537; and Alabama, 10,109.

A small military boomtown of Belmont arose outside the camp gates. Devoted to commerce, Belmont was home to the Army National Bank, Pfeifer’s Cantonment Store, the Hippodrome Theatre, Camp Pike Officers Club and the Dixieland Poolhall and more.

The biggest remainder of Belmont is St. Joseph Center of Arkansas. Known in yesteryear as St. Joseph’s Orphanage, the grand 56,000-SF building completed in 1910 was transformed into the Belmont Hotel.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Little Rock leased out St. Joseph’s and 320 acres to the commercial interests of the Belmont Hotel Co. during 1918-20.

Fire station

Receiving area

Inspection of recruits

Structurally, not much remains of Camp Pike today, but the name lives on through a section of Camp Robinson devoted to the Reserve Center operations of the Army, Navy and Marines.

A baseball field, with seating for several thousand, is among the camp’s time-ravaged casualty list. The ballpark opened in March 1918 as a Sunday diversion from the six-day training week of troops.

A memorable moment: Babe Ruth hit a home run during the second game of a five-game exhibition series between the Boston Red Sox and Brooklyn Dodgers.

Ownership of Camp Pike, which morphed into Camp Robinson in 1937 and which tripled in size during World War II, was transferred to the state in 1922.

Over the years, the complex has hosted the rehabilitation of wounded World War I vets, a Civilian Conservation Corps base, and basic training for infantry and medics as well as German POWs during World War II.

Today, the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management makes its home there.

During the first weeks of construction, Gen. Leonard Wood toured the Camp Pike site and noted in a speech: “It will prove even more valuable after war than now.”

His words still ring true nearly a century to the day since the armistice officially ended World War I at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Panoramic view of Camp Pike circa 1917.