San Diego History · Campo and the Mountain Empire
The Army put its last cavalry post at Campo, and the county record says why.
Finished six days before Pearl Harbor. Emptied in February 1944. All records sourced and cited.
Finished six days before Pearl Harbor. Emptied in February 1944. All records sourced and cited.
In 1941 the United States Army built a cavalry post sixty miles southeast of San Diego, in a valley at Campo with almost nobody in it. By the end of the war nearly three thousand Black soldiers were stationed there, on horseback, patrolling the border.
The county of San Diego's own historic record states the reason it went where it went, and it does not soften it.
"Racist attitudes and the policies of segregation, which were the norm at that time, had a strong influence on the selection of Camp Lockett as a base for black soldiers." Finding places to quarter Black troops was hard because segregation required duplicate facilities, and because, in the document's words, "Many communities strongly objected to African-American soldiers in their vicinity."
Campo was remote enough that nobody objected.
Three things before the story runs. The local Kumeyaay worked the construction crews that built the camp. The Army spent a year training these men to fight on horseback in Italy and never sent them. And Italian prisoners of war ended up living there, driving trucks into town unsupervised, and the stone walls they laid are still beside the road.
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt ran preliminary surveys in the summer of 1940.
The 11th Cavalry got there first, about four hundred and fifty officers and men with seven hundred and thirty horses, arriving November 15, 1940. They camped at Seeley and at Lake Morena while the post went up around them.
Camp Lockett was finished on December 1, 1941, six days before Pearl Harbor. One hundred thirty two buildings on seven hundred and two acres, at a cost of one million nine hundred thirty seven thousand six hundred nineteen dollars and ninety eight cents. It was named for Colonel James R. Lockett, who had served in the Spanish American War and the Philippines.
The job was the border, and everything the border carried. Patrols ran from the Otay Lakes area east to El Centro. The soldiers guarded the Morena and Barrett dams, which hold San Diego's water, and the rail line, the tunnels, the bridges and the electric relay stations.
The 11th was converted to armor. Horses were finished and everyone knew it.
The 10th Cavalry arrived on June 30, 1942, and took the barracks and the stables one for one as the 11th walked out to the train. The 10th had been organized in 1866. These were the Buffalo Soldiers, and they inherited the border, the dams and the rail line along with the buildings.
That August the regiment marked its seventy sixth anniversary with a USO show. Dinah Shore sang. So did Dale Evans.
The War Department decided to build a new 2nd Cavalry Division out of Black regiments, and the 28th Cavalry was activated at Camp Lockett on February 25, 1943 under Colonel Edwin M. Burnett.
The 10th handed over a hundred and fifty three sergeants. The rest, about fourteen hundred men, were draftees out of reception centers in New Jersey, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Most of them had never been on a horse.
They did basic training from March 29 to June 26, 1943, and then the horses started arriving.
The first came from Fort Riley in Kansas and a lot of them got sick with a fever and died. Three hundred ninety six more came from Fort Bliss. The remount station at Fort Robinson, Nebraska sent one thousand ninety, and twenty eight of those died of influenza in a single day.
The camp had to double. The Army leased more ground, built a second cantonment to the east, and ended up holding seven thousand one hundred and seven acres of Campo Valley, five miles east to west and nearly three north to south.
One of the white officers kept notes and they survive. On an officers' call at eleven hundred hours, he wrote, the entire dismounted regiment vanished when a trooper hollered "snake." He added that it happened twice.
Both regiments left within a day of each other, the 28th on February 10 and the 10th on February 11, bound for Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia. By March the 10th was in Algeria.
They went dismounted. The horses stayed.
The county's record puts what that meant in one sentence: the closing of Camp Lockett "marked the conversion of the U.S. Cavalry to modern mechanized armor and also the final manifestation of the segregated army."
The captain's wife remembered what the officers had believed. "They were training them to ride horses in Italy." It did not happen. The prohibition on Black soldiers engaging the enemy had kept them stateside for the whole stretch they were training to fight.
In April 1944 the Army turned the post into a convalescent hospital, dedicated on August 5 as Mitchell Convalescent Hospital, the first Army Service Forces convalescent hospital in the country.
Wounded men did physical reconditioning there: gymnastics, boxing, handball, golf, fishing on the lake. And horseback riding, on the cavalry horses that had been left behind.
At the same time a prisoner of war camp went into the 28th Cavalry's old quarters. Italians came up from Riverside, Germans later. They worked the mess halls, the warehouses, the shops, the grounds and the roads, as landscapers, masons, carpenters and clerks. The record notes the camp had no major problems and that prisoners drove trucks, unsupervised, into nearby towns.
They laid stone retaining walls and low stone walls along the roads. Those are still there.
The POW camp closed in May 1946 and the hospital was declared surplus on June 19 that year.
The land came apart in 1949 and 1950. Thirty nine acres went to the Mountain Empire school district and six hundred went to the County of San Diego.
Four of the cavalry stables are still standing at the north end of the historic district. A school parking lot sits where the rest of that stable row was. Several buildings are in use, several are not, and the ones that are not have broken glass and animal droppings in them.
Camp Lockett became California Historical Landmark number 1045 on October 30, 2009. The state plaque has not been ordered.
Campo and the surrounding Mountain Empire sit inside a designated historic district with a county master plan over it, and the land ownership out there traces directly to how the federal government disposed of this post. School district parcels, county parcels and reverted private leases all come out of the same 1949 unwinding.
If you are looking at land in the Campo Valley, the parcel lines and the public ownership pattern are a product of that, and they are worth understanding before you assume a piece of open ground is simply open.
Campo does not have its own market report. The nearest coverage is East County, and the rest of the county history is on the San Diego history page.
The last cavalry claim, in the record's own words. The county documentation says Camp Lockett "was the last mounted cavalry base to be constructed in the United States" and "among the very last bases within which the Buffalo Soldiers trained and operated before they were permanently disbanded as a mounted horse cavalry division." It does not say it was the last cavalry post in the country, and neither does this piece.
The draftee count. The county documentation says 1,393 draftees. The 1993 Journal article says about 1,397 men. This piece says about fourteen hundred and does not pick.
What was left out. One officer's handwritten 1994 recollection describes a September 1943 brush fire in which the 28th lost one man and a Marine unit lost roughly twenty out of eighty. That is a serious claim about another service's casualties, written from memory fifty years after the fact and not corroborated anywhere else in the record. It is not in this piece.
The photographs. The map is a 1943 United States Army map of the post. The photograph of the Kumeyaay house at Campo was made about 1924 and published in 1926, roughly fifteen years before the Army arrived. It is not a photograph of the camp and it is not presented as one. No photograph of the Buffalo Soldiers at Camp Lockett has been found in a collection that permits publication.
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