Range Riders and Game Wardens: A Brief History of Fort Bragg's Forest Ranger Program

摘要

This report provides a brief history of the Forest Ranger program at Camp Bragg and Fort Bragg from the 1920s through the 1980s. The impetus for this research was the need to establish an interpretive context for the single remaining historic ranger station structure on Fort Bragg. The report focuses on the period (1938-1982) in which the existing station was utilized for housing active duty military forest rangers. This study concludes with the transfer of ranger responsibilities to a civilian program and the subsequent abandonment of the various stations as ranger residences. Oral history interviews and documentary research focused on ranger activities at Fort Bragg as well as Camp Mackall, a modern sub-installation of Fort Bragg, which was established as a separate Army airborne training camp in World War II. Seven formal interviews were conducted with former rangers and their spouses, and informal interviews were conducted with family members of former rangers as well as the present (2006) chief of the Fort Bragg Wildlife Branch.