10/14/2026
Camp Magnolia in Columbia County started out holding men who refused to fight at all. 🌩️ It opened as a Civilian Public Service camp for conscientious objectors before the Army closed it in 1944, then reopened the next year as a branch of Camp Monticello, this time holding Italian prisoners of war instead.
A tornado tore through and damaged the camp buildings that same stretch of the 1940s. By 1946 the war was over, the prisoners were gone, and the buildings themselves went up for auction piece by piece.
Two completely different groups of men passed through that same patch of south Arkansas in just a few years, for two completely different reasons. What's a piece of your own county's wartime history that most people have never heard of?
