1930-1954

Longtime residents can recall today the Depression-era hardships, wartime rationing, civil-defense blackouts and other roller-coaster experiences of a time when the world nearly blew itself apart. It was the same story here as elsewhere in the United States.

What made Cumberland County's story exceptional is what happened at Fort Bragg from World War II on through the Korean War.

The population numbers give the statistical backdrop. The county more than doubled in size in 20 years, from 45,219 residents in 1930 to 96,006 in 1950. That included the doubling of Fayetteville's population in a 10-year period, from 17,428 in 1940 to 34,605 in 1950.

Fort Bragg was the catalyst for the growth. In July 1940, it was chosen to become the largest Army training post. By the end of that year, its population had boomed from a 1939 total of 6,000 to more than 20,000, and that was just the beginning.

In June 1941, six months before the country would enter World War II, Life magazine profiled the post in a cover story with this headline: "With 67,000 Men, It Is Army's Biggest Camp."

Fayetteville, which for its first 150 years had been a typical courthouse town, became the prototypical "Army town," with a mixture of civilians and soldiers that made for social and cultural enrichment, conflict and upheaval.

Life was changing in other ways. Rural residents in particular benefited from New Deal-era programs that provided rural electrification. And in 1949, Dr. W.P. DeVane became the first black person to be elected to the Fayetteville City Council since Reconstruction.

Natural disasters also marked the era, from the record-breaking Cape Fear River flood of 1945 to the destruction caused by Hurricane Hazel in 1954.

As the county celebrated its bicentennial in 1954, the winds of change - military and civilian, rural and urban, black and white - continued to blow.

A dozen farmers from Beaver Dam Township gathered in spring 1954 to help an ailing neighbor plow his fields. What would have been a day's work took 59 minutes.