Updated: 4/28/2021
Hwy 62 & Ave. H
White City, OR 97503
Culture
General
History
Military
Specialized
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Tom Marshel
phone: 541-826-2111 x3585
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The Camp White training site consisted of buildings and an area stretching to the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. A few miles from the camp were Upper and Lower Table Rocks, flat rock formations hundreds of feet high, and Mt. McGlaughlin which looked like an inverted ice cream cone. In addition to the 300th, Camp White was the training site for their sister battalion, the 299th Combat Engineers.
In May 1941 the War Department announced its decision that one of nine new training camps would be Camp White. In November of 1941 the planning was nearing completion. Three days after the engineering office finished the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, War was declared on December 7, 1941 and the camp would be needed. On January 7, 1942 the camp in Medford and another in Corvallis received the go ahead. Actual construction began on February 25, 1942 and the camp was completed on December 14, 1942.
The general plan of the camp involved three zones. There was a central building core for services, housing and administration and two huge flanking ranges for field training and maneuvers. The northwest range was the “Beagle Range” and the southwest one was the “Antelope Range”. The building core was a mile wide rectangle, its shape broken only by the addition of the station hospital, an angled portion north of the main headquarters on the west side of Crater Lake Highway which would bisect the building core north to south.
On September 15, 1942, the camp was officially dedicated as “Camp George A. White” after the adjutant general of the Oregon National Guard, who had recently died. The camp involved 77 square miles and trained 40,000 troops at a time. It was the second largest city in the state.
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