Photo By Scott Sturkol | Contractors work on a renovation of the U.S. Army Garrison-Fort McCoy Headquarters on...... read more read more
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Work on the renovation of the U.S. Army Garrison-Fort McCoy Headquarters, Building 100, continues through the winter months — including January which has seen some extreme cold and snow affect the project.
The work, which began Oct. 1, involves a complete overhaul of the building that was originally built 80-plus years ago in 1942, said Fort McCoy Directorate of Public Works Engineering Division Chief Dan Coburn.
The contract to complete the renovation, Coburn said, was awarded to R.J. Jurowski Construction, headquartered in Whitehall, Wis., for $5.4 million.
“It is a complete gut and repair of the entire facility,” Coburn said in a previous news article. “Construction … is expected to take one year.”
Back in 1942, the Fort McCoy Garrison Headquarters building was part of a much larger, rapid expansion of the post during World War II, when Fort McCoy (then known as Camp McCoy) was transformed from a quiet training site into a major “New Camp” cantonment for mobilizing and training troops, history shows.
In 1942, after the U.S. entry into World War II, the War Department authorized and funded construction of an expanded cantonment area at Camp McCoy to house and train tens of thousands of Soldiers. Construction of the cantonment began in early 1942, with grading and building work starting around March after engineers surveyed the site in 1941.
During that intense build-out, more than 1,500 buildings were erected in a matter of months as part of the base’s “New Camp” effort. These included barracks, support facilities, administrative buildings, and headquarters structures. The headquarters building was among these original World War II-era structures built as part of that cantonment. It was designed to support command, operations, and administrative functions for the base’s wartime training mission.
The buildings erected in 1942, including the headquarters, were typically temporary wooden structures meant to support a wartime surge in training capacity, history shows. They were built quickly but robustly enough to last through the war and into subsequent decades of use. Fort McCoy’s expansion in 1942 was a major national defense project — more than 8,000 workers participated, and the total cost for the mobilization cantonment exceeded $30 million (about half a billion in today’s dollars).
Fort McCoy itself dates back to 1909 as a training and maneuver area; it expanded massively in 1942 as wartime needs increased, history further shows. The installation continued to evolve after World War II, being designated a permanent training center in the 1970s and receiving new construction in later decades, but the garrison headquarters building’s roots are in that pivotal World War II expansion.
Fort McCoy Directorate of Public Works officials said once the headquarters is fully renovated, it will have modern design and features that bring it to code in the 21st century. If the renovation only takes a year, it will be completed at the end of September.
Fort McCoy’s motto is to be the “Total Force Training Center.”
Located in the heart of the upper Midwest, Fort McCoy is the only U.S. Army installation in Wisconsin.
The installation has provided support and facilities for the field and classroom training of more than 100,000 military personnel from all services nearly every year since 1984.
Learn more about Fort McCoy online at https://home.army.mil/mccoy, on Facebook by searching “ftmccoy,” on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/fortmccoywi, and on X (formerly Twitter) by searching “usagmccoy.”
Also try downloading the My Army Post app to your smartphone and set “Fort McCoy” or another installation as your preferred base. Fort McCoy is also part of Army’s Installation Management Command where “We Are The Army’s Home.”
| Date Taken: | 01.22.2026 |
| Date Posted: | 01.22.2026 17:18 |
| Story ID: | 556574 |
| Location: | FORT MCCOY, WISCONSIN, US |
| Web Views: | 181 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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