Fort Barfoot

Fort Pickett (1942, original Confederate honoree) → Fort Barfoot (March 2023, honoring Col. Van T. Barfoot — Medal of Honor recipient earned as a Technical Sergeant near Carano, Italy in May 1944, Mississippi-born Choctaw Nation citizen, served Korea and Vietnam) → Fort Pickett again (June 2025, this time honoring Pvt. Vernon W. Pickett, a WWII soldier, not the Confederate general). Whatever the gate signage reads when you arrive, the structural truth is the same: this is the Virginia Army National Guard's primary training installation, federally released to Virginia in 1997 and operated by VAARNG ever since. The federal active component has a small cadre presence and routes federal training tenants through here; the soul of the post is Guard. 41,500 acres of Southside Virginia configured as the Maneuver Training Center Heavy and the Joint Maneuver Training Center — one of the Guard's premier heavy-maneuver venues, hosting armor and mech-infantry rotations year-round plus federal/state law enforcement training, the 183rd Regiment's RTI courses, and a peak summer Annual Training surge. Blackstone (3,400 residents) is the gate town and the cultural anchor — the post and the town are functionally one ecosystem with a deep VAARNG identity. Crewe and Burkeville are smaller still. Farmville (30 min west) has Longwood and Hampden-Sydney. Richmond is an hour north for actual urban amenities. BAH at $1,515 (E-5 deps under MHA ZZ710) against $900-$1,400 3BR rents in Nottoway makes this one of the most generous cost-of-living trades in the federal active-component Army — if you're stationed here on Title 10 orders. The Southside landscape — pine forest, slow creeks, tobacco-history small towns — is genuinely pretty. No MTF on post, so plan healthcare around Centra Southside, Kenner clinic at Fort Gregg-Adams, or Richmond. Pack patience for the gate-sign tense.