In 1822, Colonel Zachary Taylor built Cantonment Jesup on the Sabine River to impose order on what had been, for sixteen years, genuinely ungoverned ground. The officers who served there — Taylor, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee — would go on to define the next half-century of American history, and Fort Jesup itself staged the Army of Observation's move into Texas that ignited the Mexican-American War in 1846. When the United States won Texas, the fort lost its purpose and was abandoned the same year. Nearly a century later the same longleaf pine flats hosted the Louisiana Maneuvers — 500,000 soldiers across 3,400 square miles in 1941 — and by July 1943 Camp Polk held captured soldiers from the Afrika Korps. The base, renamed Fort Johnson in 2023, is still here. The ground keeps getting assigned new missions.
