History
The base had its beginning in 1940 when a group of concerned Valdosta and Lowndes County citizens began searching for a way to assist the expanding defense program. A committee was formed to obtain a military airfield for their community. In October 1940, the committee sent a letter to Maxwell AAF inviting the Air Corps to consider the Valdosta area. When engineers arrived, they rejected the existing Valdosta Municipal Airport because of excessive grading costs and began looking for another site. The Air Corps found an acceptable site 11.5 miles NNE of Valdosta near the small settlement of Bemis. The site was located on the Lakeland Flatwoods Project, a 9,300 acres (38 km2) tract of sub-marginal land, not primarily suited for cultivation. The United States Department of Agriculture, which owned the land, was experimenting at that time with forest grazing at the project. The Air Corps approved to locate the base on the tract in March 1941. Two months later, on 14 May, the Department of Agriculture transferred ownership of the property to the War Department.
Construction got underway on 28 July 1941 for a twin-engine advanced training base with accommodations for 4,100 men. The $3.4 million project's 160 buildings included 72 barracks and 16 supply rooms. Also provided in the original contract were four 5,000-foot runways, two asphalt and two concrete, plus a spur of the Georgia and Florida Railroad.
Read more about this topic: Moody Air Force Base
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)