Oregon’s second largest city built in six months

By Finn J.D. John
May 25, 2025

BY EARLY 1941, the U.S. Army knew it was about to get sucked into at least one of the wars that were already raging around the world.

The Selective Service and Training Act had passed the previous fall, and already young American men were being drafted into the Army, swelling its ranks with green recruits. Sooner or not much later they’d be in combat, fighting for their lives. There was no time to be lost — those combat noobs had to be trained and hardened and prepared so that they would have as good a chance as possible when thrown into the fight.

With that in mind, the Army started looking for suitable locations for a combat-training campus between Portland and San Francisco on the West Coast.

It would need to be about 65,000 acres and, in addition to the usual building sites and gunnery ranges, it would have to include geography similar to the sites where the fighting was expected to happen: rolling hills, steep slopes, swampy terrain, thick forests, and something approximating jungle foliage.

Moving very fast — after all, new conscripts were coming in all the time — the Army settled on two prospective sites: one near Eugene, and one just north of Corvallis.

The Corvallis site won the toss — there were fewer residents to be displaced, and the railroad and highway infrastructure was more developed. That was in June 1941.

By the end of that year, the funds were allocated and the plans drawn up, and nine months later Oregon’s second largest city had spring into being out of the swampy ground.

The residents of the small town of Wells had just enough time to organize a community goodbye picnic before being hustled off in the course of a colossal eminent-domain proceeding. As it often is in such situations, the government was stingy in its compensation for the land it was taking, and some sharp courthouse action resulted as former landowners sued to get a less unfair deal; but everyone understood that now that there was a war on, sacrifices would have to be made. Within a few weeks, everyone was off the land and it was, as they say, shovel-ready.

And then four big construction companies moved in — companies that had, before the war, been fierce rivals. Between mid-spring and fall of 1942, they put together about 1,800 buildings — including, according to historian John Baker, “a field house with three full-size basketball courts, a bakery which had a capacity to produce 45,000 loaves of bread every day, a wastewater treatment plant, a fresh water treatment plant … a heating plant, 500 barracks, 11 chapels, five movie theaters, 13 post exchanges, two service clubs, a hospital … a bank, post office, phone exchange, warehouses, coal yards, headquarters building, a gas house, firing ranges, a (model) German village, electrical substation and service, airfield, day and orderly rooms, rail yards and the major improvements of Highway 99W.”

To do this, 8,000 people worked all summer. At their peak, they were finishing a building every 32 minutes. Electricians learned to wear stilts to save the time it usually took to move a ladder around. The hospital, Baker said, broke a national record for construction speed. And it was all done on time, and under budget.

By mid-September the instant city was ready to welcome its 40,000-odd inhabitants. This, at a time when Salem had just 31,000 residents and Eugene about 20,000. (Portland, at 305,000, was the runaway leader in population.)

II. Training.

THE CONSTRUCTION CREWS must have felt the urgency of their job the more because officers and staff were trickling in well before the place was built. Arriving, many of them with their families in tow, they found the housing situation was really tight. Some spent the summer in tents, while others were taken in by local residents until things could be made ready.

But things were ready in time to welcome the first units of recruits to be trained for combat at Camp Adair: The 96th “Deadeye” Division, and the 104th “Timberwolves” division.

The soldiers of the Deadeye Division must have felt pretty sanguine about their anticipated several months of combat training when they arrived at the scenic, sunny cantonment, close to the end of the dry season. They would soon have cause to revisit those impressions, as the rains started just about at the same time training did, and soon they started referring to their new temporary home as “Swamp Adair.”

As for the Timberwolves, they at least were spared from the disappointment — their training started in the middle of winter that same year.

“Basic training for the newly arrived recruits (of the 104th Infantry) started on Dec. 14, 1942,” wrote Leo Hoegh and Howard Doyle of the 104th, in a 1946 article in the Washington Infantry Journal Press. “The soldiers soon learned why the natives along the Willamette Valley hibernated each winter. Raincoats were part of the regular uniforms as the dougboys sloshed along over the sodden countryside and learned to throw themselves in the cold mud with disregard.

“During ‘Basic,’ men could be seen marching in every direction and in every formation. They were learning to become fighting soldiers. As motorists rode on Highway 99W past the cantonment, they saw some of the grimmest training that American soldiers could get. Cold steel flashed in the sunlight or pierced the fog. Whatever the weather, the infantrymen were attacking dummies with the bayonet. All the men learned their weapons and in January they were firing record courses in the driving rain and blinding snow.”

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Of course, from the Army’s standpoint, the relentless awfulness of the weather and terrain was a feature, rather than a bug. As the soldiers learned to survive and fight through the harsh conditions of a Willamette Valley winter, they developed the toughness that would enable them to survive under similar conditions when German or Japanese soldiers were shooting at them.

That didn’t make it any more fun, though, for the men who were being thus toughened.

Later the 30th “Powder River” and 70th “Trailblazers” infantry divisions joined the 96th and 104th, so that if misery really did love company, there was at least the comfort of more company for the miserable, cold, muddy, itchy soldiers.

“After a week in the rain and cold, by the weekend the barracks were a luxury, as was a weekend pass in any of the surrounding towns,” historian Baker writes. “When any Camp Adair soldier was asked about training at the camp, even though he might have said how beautiful the Willamette Valley was, he usually replied, ‘wet, cold, rain-soaked, hot, itchy, and full of poison oak.’ ”

Poison oak was a particular hazard for soldiers at Camp Adair. The climate and environment throughout the 60,000 acre campus was nearly ideal for the stuff, and soldiers quickly learned to recognize it with dread. Severe poison-oak rashes became one of the most common ailments treated in the camp hospital.

As the war dragged on, too, it got harder to visit those neighboring towns, as cars and car parts were not available (especially tires).

By the time the war ended, though, Camp Adair was no longer being used to train soldiers. As the rush of recruits early in the war abated, the Army found it was easier to train the remaining troops in camps closer to the major population centers. So Camp Adair became a prisoner-of-war camp for the last few months of the war.

The camp hospital, too, stayed busy for the duration. But by the end of the war, Camp Adair was largely unused. And as the Army looked around at all the surplus war materiel that it had created to fight the great struggle, Camp Adair was probably pretty close to the top of everyone’s list of places that could be easily closed down to save money.

III. Closure

MOST OF CAMP Adair was torn down almost as quickly as it had been put up. The main cantonment buildings were declared surplus at the end of 1945, and various salvage contractors were invited to come dismantle it for resale. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of Camp Adair houses were sold off to homebuilders around the valley. At least some of those were sold in 8-by-12 or 8-by-16-foot panels — the walls of the buildings were made of one-inch tongue-and-groove boards ribbon-nailed to cross braces of the same stock and with 3/8-inch sheet-rock (Kaiser brand) secured to the inside, an approach that has been dubbed “structural sheathing.” If you are looking at a modest house in the Willamette Valley with two-inch-thick walls, chances are good that you’re looking at a Camp Adair house.

The hospital section was turned over to Oregon State University, and it was used for some years after the war as housing for students studying at the college on the G.I. bill — of whom there were quite a few, of course, freshly returned from the war. They called it Adair Student Village. It was closed and most of the apartment buildings demolished in 1951, but by that time a town had sprung up around it, and that town today is of course Adair Village.

Large parts of the wooded southwestern area of the campus, including the old townsite of Tampico and a large swath of Soap Creek Valley, were handed over to OSU and added to its Dunn Forest holdings. Visitors to those lands still today occasionally find “souvenirs” from the days when maneuvers and live-fire training was done there. (I myself found a coil of razor wire there during a Benton County Search and Rescue training exercise on Prune Ridge in 2004, and another member of our party found an old expended smoke grenade.)

In 1957, part of the cantonment area became Adair Air Force Station and SAGE Support Facility — SAGE was a system of information processing computers and equipment linked to the nation’s radar and other sensors during the Cold War, which was built for purposes of detecting a Soviet attack in time to respond. Plans were made to install a battery of surface-to-air missiles on the site. But, before that work could get started, the program was canceled, and the Air Force closed down its facilities there in 1969.

Today, the northeastern corner of Camp Adair is a wildlife refuge, the E.E. Wilson. It’s been restored to the seasonal wetland that it once was, so mosquitos are not unknown there, although — thanks to the plentiful bug-eating wildlife — not as common as you might expect. The long, straight, broad stretches of abandoned blacktop make for a pleasant bicycling spot, and the plentiful ruins and foundation walls are great for geocaching. It’s an especially rewarding place to visit with a copy of Baker’s book to use as a “ghost town guide.”

In the town of Adair Village today, a few of the older houses as well as businesses are still housed in old Camp Adair houses — either adopted as they stood, or purchased from a salvage company and moved to the site. Along William R. Carr Avenue, you can see two of the old barracks buildings that were purchased in 2010 for the Camp Adair Interpretive Center.

(Sources: Camp Adair: The Story of a World War II Cantonment, a book by John H. Baker published in 2004 by the author; Benton County Historical Museum)