Camp Tyson

Barrage balloons were big: about 85 feet long and 35 feet across, nicknamed big bags, air whales and sky elephants. Anchored by nearly invisible steel cables arranged in circles, they were meant to endanger enemy aircraft over coastal cities. British instructors who had seen bombing firsthand taught the trainees, and a good crew could inflate and launch a balloon in under thirty minutes. A 1943 expansion tripled the camp's original 2,000 acres and destroyed the antebellum house Bowdenville. German and Italian prisoners of war also worked here, on the land and on area roads.

What the plaque says

Camp Tyson Named in honor of Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Tyson U.S. Senator and veteran of the Spanish-American and First World wars, Camp Tyson was the only barrage balloon training center in the U.S. Army during World War II. Construction began on this 6,115 acre site on Sept. 4, 1941, at a cost of $10 million. Under the command of Brig. Gen. John B. Maynard, thousands of American servicemen were trained here for Barrage Balloon Service of the Coast Artillery Corps.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge — 16 mi
  A 51,000-acre refuge along Kentucky Lake and the Tennessee River, created in 1945 for migratory birds, with a visitor center in Springville and a drowned Archaic site nearby.
• Patsy Cline Crash Site Memorial — 17 mi
  An engraved rock off Mt. Carmel Road near Camden marking where a small plane carrying Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins went down on March 5, 1963.
• Paris Landing State Park — 21 mi
  A Kentucky Lake state park on the site of a Tennessee River steamboat landing, created after the 1944 TVA dam drowned a sulphur-spring resort.
• Johnsonville State Historic Park — 26 mi
  A Tennessee River park on the site of a Union supply depot shelled in November 1864 and of the town later drowned by Kentucky Lake, with earthworks, a railroad bed and an African American cemetery.

More markers nearby

• Governor Thomas Clarke Rye — 5.1 mi
• Edwin Wiley Grove — 6.1 mi
• James Davis Porter — 6.1 mi
• John Wesley Crockett — 6.1 mi