10/16/2026
A rainy Missouri Army camp gave a comic strip its famous name.
Camp Crowder, south of Neosho, was named for Major General Enoch Crowder, a native Missourian who wrote the Selective Service Act.
Congressman Dewey Short sponsored the legislation that got it built. Its Signal Corps training began about a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It opened during one of the rainiest spring seasons on record. According to a Kansas City history writer, the men who trained there quickly nicknamed it "Camp Swampy."
One of them was Mort Walker. He was drafted while studying at the University of Missouri and was sent to Camp Crowder for radio repair school in 1943, where he spent several weeks. Years later, he created Beetle Bailey, and Camp Swampy became the home of his Army cartoon. Camp Crowder was the inspiration. A college spokesperson says Walker also recalled the camp's flooding.
Dick Van D**e also spent time at Camp Crowder in the early 1940s. He later used the camp in an episode of his hit show, which aired November 6, 1961.
The camp was huge. At the end of the war, 45,000 troops were either permanently or temporarily stationed at Camp Crowder, nine times Neosho's prewar civilian population. The Army closed it in the early 1960s.
Today, Crowder College occupies a number of the original buildings, and the Missouri National Guard uses 4,358 acres for training. The old camp theater was rebuilt on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus.
The famous comic strip fort began as a muddy Missouri camp.
Did someone in your family train at Camp Crowder?
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