The U.S. military base in Portage County, what locals call “the arsenal,” has been here since 1940, yet many residents still don’t know what lies within the perimeters of the compound or what goes on there today.
You won’t find any personnel testing extraterrestrial technology — not above ground at least. But what you will find is a National Guard training facility with state-of-the-art live-fire shooting ranges, laser simulation courses, a 19th century stone bridge, and much more.
In 2010 and 2011, Lynnea St. John of Windham organized tours of the base through word of mouth to raise funds for the village’s bicentennial celebration in 2011. Now in 2024, she’s done it again, this time to raise funds for the Windham schools. (This tour raised $1,800.)
Tour participants met at the Windham High School parking lot on Oct. 16, where two Windham school buses waited to take them on a two-and-a-half-hour tour of the compound. The Portager was invited to join the tour and take pictures.
The tour, led by retired Col. Edward Meade and Garfield Training Center garrison commander Lt. Col. Shaun Robinson, included thorough descriptions of several training sites and gave participants a chance to explore the grounds. It was Meade who first agreed to St. John’s proposal back in 2010.
“They hadn’t done tours before, maybe a tour here or there, but it wasn’t like they wanted to do tours or anything,” St. John said. “I contacted the commander [Meade at the time]. We met him for lunch and I presented the idea to him and his response was, ‘I don’t know who would pay $20 to come in and see where I work.’
“To him, it wasn’t a big deal; it was just his place of employment. They didn’t know how important this was to all the local people, not just Windham, but everybody around here worked out there at the arsenal.”
Through the gate
The official name of the facility is the James A. Garfield Joint Military Training Center [C-JAG], although it’s gone through a few name changes in the past. The training grounds are spread out over 21,793 acres with a main gate located at 8451 State Route 5 in Ravenna, an east gate in Newton Falls and a north gate in Windham.
The acreage that harbors the Camp Garfield training center has been in use by the U.S. Army since 1940, when an expansive dual-installation compound was constructed to produce and store ammunition for WWII. The compound encompassed two installations, the Ravenna Ordnance Plant, where the ammunition was made, and the Portage Ordnance Depot, where it was stored.
The compound served as an ammunition plant and storage facility again during the Korean War and the war in Vietnam, and it was used in a similar capacity until 1984, after which it was used for ammunition refurbishment and research and development projects until 1992. It sat dormant until 1999, whereupon it became the Ravenna Training and Logistics Site of the Ohio National Guard.
It was called Camp Ravenna Joint Military Training Center until 2018, before Major General John Harris changed it to Camp James A. Garfield Joint Military Training Center. Personnel refer to it as C-JAG.
“The reason behind it was that it’s always been something Ravenna, like it was Ravenna Ammunition Plant, Ravenna Ordnance Plant, Ravenna Training Logistics Site, Camp Ravenna,” Robinson said. “[General Harris] didn’t want to dismiss our history, but he wanted to draw a line in the sand and say, moving forward, we’re going to be a training center, so we’re focusing on new ranges and new barracks. … He renamed it Camp James A. Garfield because Garfield was the 20th president, but also, he was a major general and he led troops in the Civil War, and both of his sons were in the Ohio National Guards, so there’s a long lineage of Garfields being in the Ohio National Guard.”
The training center is 11 miles long, three miles wide and is enclosed by 33 miles of fence that contains over 600 deer, some of which made appearances during the tour.
There are about 100 personnel who work at the facility on a daily basis, but Robinson said that number can sometimes swell to over 2,500 on weekends. He also stated that the exact number of personnel who work at the compound can’t be disclosed because of operations security.
Battle training
C-JAG offers a multitude of amenities and qualification courses to prepare soldiers for battle, including a 40-foot repelling tower, live fire ranges for weapons such as handguns, rifles, Mk 19 grenade launchers, detonation cord and bangalore torpedoes, as well as simulator ranges that use lasers, which help soldiers perfect their skills without the use of live ammunition. Soldiers also carry out bivouac exercises on the compound’s sprawling acreage.
There’s even a laser simulation course for weapons-mounted military vehicles, as well as off-road land navigation courses.
During the tour, Robinson explained that soldiers undergoing basic marksmanship training with M4 semi-automatic rifles are first required to practice non-live fire at the engagement skills trainer range before they can qualify with live ammunition at the Automated Record Fire range, a $2.4 million, a 30-acre range finished in 2019.
“It’s a big video board and what it does is you’re using a rifle, but you’re using laser sights and you’re shooting [without the use of live ammunition], and the computer gives you your feedback of whether you’re high, or low, or left, or right,” Robinson said. “So you change your sights. You get to be comfortable. Sometimes it’s hot, raining or cold; this is climate controlled, so you get to relax in there.”
Once a soldier is ready to qualify on the live-fire course with M4s, they must first sight in their rifles and continue to practice trigger squeeze, sight picture and breathing technique at the zero range.
“This is the beginning of your range day,” Robinson said. “This is the zero range. You show up and you’ll have a little silhouette down there on the black and white, and you’re only 25 meters away, so you’ll squeeze off three rounds and then you’ll go down and check to see where you’re hitting. The idea is, there’s a circle in the middle of the target, you’ll want to get five out of six in the circle. You keep shooting three-round bursts until you confirm your zero. Once you do that, you’re ready to go fire on the real range [to qualify].”
The main qualification range for M4 semi-automatic rifles, the Automated Record Fire range, is nearly 10 acres and has 16 lanes with 40 silhouette targets out to 50, 100, 150, 200, 250 and 300 meters. The odd numbered lanes have orange targets, and the even lanes have yellow targets. Each pop-up target silhouette has a lifter and is wired with a hotbox hit sensor that records a shooter’s hits or misses on a computer located in a tower that overlooks the range.
During qualification, soldiers shoot from behind wooden barricades, but it hasn’t always been that way.
“In the old days, we would shoot from the prone position and a kneeling position,” Robinson said. “In today’s combat environment, with more urban combat, you find yourself fighting behind different structures, behind different walls. We now have wooden barricades which were developed out of the techniques and tactics of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is how they qualify now.”
C-JAG also has a first-of-its-kind Multi-Purpose Machine Gun range, the most expensive range on the compound. The MPMG is over 80 acres and is where soldiers train with .50-caliber machine guns, .300 Winchester Magnum rifles, Mk 19 grenade launchers, M240 Bravo machine guns, 5.56 squad automatic weapons and M4 fully automatic rifles.
Simulating danger
The tour also included a view of C-JAG’s structural collapse simulator, a training course that mimics a building that has been demolished by explosives.
“They’re simulating that a building has fallen down, or there’s been some kind of explosion or bomb,” Robinson said. “They have to go in to find casualties or rescue casualties. The concrete blocks you see right there, what they’ll do with a lot of those is, you’ll have to use a jackhammer to dig through and get to somebody, recover them. Sometimes they’ll have a bunny out there for the dog to find — the dogs always find them wherever it’s put.”
If you live in close proximity to C-JAG, you may have seen military helicopters and C-130J Hercules aircraft flying overhead and wondered what they were doing. Robinson said they’re carrying out routine training operations.
“We do some helicopter sling load operations with the big concrete bricks out here,” Robinson said. “The helicopters will fly in, they’ll sling load the bricks, they’ll pick them up, they’ll drag them around, and then bring them back down. Every Tuesday and Thursday, the 910th Airlift Wing [from Youngstown], they do those low flyovers and drops [with the C-130Js].”
The helicopters are also used for brownout training, a drill that prepares pilots and soldiers to disembark aircraft in dusty environments.
There are no aviation assets at C-JAG. The C-130J Hercules aircraft belong to the 910th Airlift Wing, and they fly in from the Youngstown Air Reserve Station but don’t land at C-JAG. They just make training drops and then they head back to their home base. The helicopters are Black Hawks, Comanches and smaller aircraft and can fly in from Akron, Canton or even Columbus.
‘Three kinds of grass’
Marty Sterpka, 66, has lived in Portage County his entire life and has been a fan of military history as far back as he can remember. He even has a dog named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the illustrious commander who defended Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
He was on tour bus #2, escorted by Meade, and was surprised when he learned that C-JAG has a tank training course.
“I did not know there were M1A1 Abrams tanks in there,” Sterpka said. “I had no idea they did tank training in there. Col. Meade was saying they don’t have the room to do the live fire, but they do the laser guided, and they do the computer stuff. But they actually have the big tanks, which was pretty cool.”
Back when the compound became a site for ammunition production and storage in 1940, nearly 700 earth-covered ammunition storage facilities with 12” headwalls able to resist a 250,000 pound explosion were erected, often called magazines or igloos. About 600 of those magazines remain on the grounds, some of which could be viewed on the tour. Robinson said the magazines are now empty, but are still in good condition.
Much of C-JAG’S compound is forested, but there’s a vast amount of grass, which Robinson said he is in a constant battle with every year. But various jurisdictions determine how the land is maintained.
“I learned a valuable lesson when I came here: There’s three kinds of grass,” Robinson said. “There’s state grass that my state maintenance guys mow that’s mostly on Route 5. There’s federal grass; the federal government pays Weaver to come and do it. And there’s range grass that just my range guys mow. … It’s very complicated, it’s very expensive, and we’re losing. if you look around, you see all this stuff [forest and grass], we’re slowly losing it again. We’ve been trying to keep the post, but it’s growing in on us.”
Robinson said there’s speculation as to why the Army chose Northeast Ohio as the location for the arsenal back in 1940. Some people think it was because the cloudy climate would make it difficult for enemy aircraft to see it from the sky, but that’s not the case.
“The truth of why this site was selected in Ohio, the first reason was the railroads, there was the Baltimore and Ohio [Railroad] and the Erie Railroad,” Robinson said. “The second was the available farmland. And the third was the workforces of Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron and Canton.”
St. John said of all the sites on the tour, the 19th century bridge was favored most among the participants. She thinks the bridge once divided two farms, the Wadsworth family farm on one side, the Woodworth family farm on the other.
The event was invite only, but if you’re lucky enough to have the right connection, there will probably be another tour next year.
“Now, after I posted a couple pictures [of the recent tour on Facebook], I get all these people that say, ‘I didn’t know about it, I want to go,’’’ St. John said. “So now I have another list of people that want to go. I told them in the spring.”
Correction: Because of incorrect information provided to The Portager, an earlier version of this article reported the stone bridge was constructed before the Civil War.
