"Welcome To FORT BENNING" a Fort Benning Travel Page by cobrioc

Fort Benning, Georgia are located on the Georgia/Alabama border, 123 miles southwest of Atlanta and 113 miles west of Macon, Georgia.

Henry Lewis Benning, for whom Fort Benning was named, saw careers as a soldier, attorney, politician, and Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. A native Georgian, Benning's career began in Columbus in 1835 when he set up residence and began practicing law. At the age of 39, two years after his unsuccessful campaign for Congress, he was elected associate justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. He was the youngest man to hold that office.

Benning was a staunch advocate of States Rights and took a prominent part in the conventions concerning secession prior to the War Between the States.

With the start of the War Between the States, Benning recruited men to form the 17th Regiment of Georgia Volunteers. During the first year and a half of the war, he fought with General Robert E. Lee, and attained the rank of major general. Because of his coolness in battle, he became known to his troops as "Old Rock."

Fort Benning is known as the "Home of the Infantry". It is here that the famed United States Army Infantry School was established and through the years gradually emerged as the most influential infantry center in the modern world. Fort Benning and the Infantry School are so intertwined that it is virtually impossible to trace the history of Fort Benning without recording the evolution of the school.

From 1918 until the present, the development of Fort Benning has been directly proportional to the progress of the school. Throughout the years, the mission of Fort Benning and the Infantry School has remained fundamentally the same: "to produce the world's finest combat infantrymen."

The Infantry School has either trained in its officer courses or honed in its command structure some of the nation's most prominent military figures. Leaders like five-star generals Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall and others like George Patton and Colin Powell, learned their craft at Fort Benning.
"I Am The Infantry, the Queen of Battle, Follow Me!"