40 • 2026 • Morrison County Record • www. mcrecord. com • Little Falls Directory
Camp Ripley
Minnesota Military & Veterans Museum
Camp Ripley is a state-owned 53,000 acre military training center located on the Mississippi River just north of Little Falls.
While primarily a National Guard facility, it provides yearround training for all military service branches and components. In recent years, Minnesota state agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources, Department of Transportation, and Minnesota State Patrol have also come to rely on Camp Ripley’ s exceptional facilities for their education and training needs.
It was opened to troops in 1931 after an exhaustive search for a Minnesota National Guard training site that was centrally located and well suited for tactical maneuvers. By happy coincidence, the chosen site encompassed the greater part of what had once been old Fort Ripley, a frontier Army post occupied from 1849-1877, and the new post took its name from the old.
During World War II, the federal government took over Camp Ripley for use as an installation of the Army Service Forces, Seventh Service Command. From July 1942 to October 1943, thousands of federal troops received basic and advanced training here. Many were assigned to the 960th Air Base Security Battalion or to one of the dozens of Military Police( Aviation) Training Companies. The 99th Infantry Battalion( Sep), consisting of Norwegian-Americans, was activated at Camp Ripley in August 1942 and grew to 700 men by the time it transferred that fall to Fort Snelling and then to Camp Hale, Colorado, to complete training. There was a band( the 394th Army Air Force Band), and in the summer of 1943 Camp Ripley was home to the 173rd Station Hospital. Its 250-bed tent hospital was the only one of this kind in the nation. About 1,000 Soldiers were housed on post over the winter of 1942-43, and the numbers grew to over 7,000 the following summer when a Military Police( Aviation) Training Center was activated. Camp Ripley had been built in the 1930s as a summer training camp, however, and was poorly equipped for the cold and snow of a northern Minnesota winter. The Army, not wishing to contend with the difficulties caused by its first winter at Camp Ripley, decided in late summer 1943 to discontinue use of the post for wartime training. Nearly all federal troops were transferred out in October 1943 and that winter the post was returned to state control.
In the 70s, heated year-round barracks began to be built to accommodate cold weather training. A vigorous building and renovation effort has been steadily underway ever since, changing Camp
Ripley from a summer annual training site for the Minnesota National Guard to a state-of-the-art, year-round military training and education installation for all branches of service, as well as law enforcement personnel.
Construction in the 1980s and 90s was especially heavy, including a 98,700-square foot Post Headquarters / Training Community Center; 62,000-square foot Troop Issue Subsistence Activity( TISA) for food distribution and storage; major improvements to the post’ s two aircraft runways; a regional maintenance training building; a huge Mobilization and Training Equipment Site( MATES) complex providing organizational maintenance for 900 tracked and wheeled vehicles; a 31,000-square foot Education Center containing 20 classrooms; and a fully equipped center for medical training and care.
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