Camp Claiborne, LA

Little of Camp Claiborne remains: part of a gate, building footings and slabs, old streets and parking lots, and a few fenced shells. The Forest Service manages the site and maintains the 26-mile Claiborne Trail, and the Army Corps of Engineers has been evaluating the grounds for unexploded ordnance. Some buildings left the site whole, and a camp chapel now serves a Baptist church in Clarence. In that chapel worship was segregated, with African American troops in the balcony and white soldiers in the lower pews. The camp was active from October 1940 to December 1945.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 9.7 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Valentine Lake Recreation Area — 15 mi
  A 46-acre Kisatchie National Forest lake dug by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s, with a campground and the head of the Wild Azalea Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 16 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 17 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

More markers nearby

• African-American Soldiers at Camp Claiborne — steps away
• Training At Camp Claiborne / Life At Camp Claiborne — steps away
• Camp Claiborne — steps away
• Camp Claiborne (Birthplace of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions) — 0.8 mi