England Air Force Base History

Beyond its fighter wings, England had a quieter job: watching the sky. Air Defense Command put a radar squadron on the base in November 1954, fed by gap-filler sites at Delhi, Weeks Island and Lake Charles, and F-102 interceptors flew from the field in 1959 and 1960. The base was then slated to become a SAGE data center, a hub of the computerized air defense network, but budget cuts closed that project in March 1963 and the FAA took over the site. Part of the old radar site is now a golf course.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kent Plantation House — 3.1 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 4.8 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 5.1 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 8.1 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Melady House — 1.2 mi
• Kent Plantation House — 3.2 mi
• Louisiana Baptist Convention — 4.1 mi
• Cook Home — 4.3 mi