Pitts: Signs of the times at Fort Bragg a reminder name change coming

The distinctive dark-brown, wooden signs that welcome drivers to entrances to Fort Bragg have become a familiar part of the landscape.

Over my years at The Fayetteville Observer, our website and newspaper have used pictures of one of the signs many times as our stock photo to go with all sorts of stories we write about the post.

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So it was a little startling when WRAL’s Gilbert Baez recently posted one of the signs at the Knox Street entrance with the white letters stripped. Only the dark but clear imprint remains with the now familiar words: “Fort Bragg Home of The Airborne and Special Operations Forces.”

I asked the public affairs folks at Bragg if this was the first well, sign, of the post's impending name change to Fort Liberty in June.

More:'It's official': Fort Bragg to be known as Fort Liberty later this year

The answer: Not really.

The post permanently closed the Knox Street entrance Dec. 1due to low traffic.

“The E. Knox Gate sign is being taken down due to it being obsolete,” Sharilyn Wells a Fort Bragg spokeswoman, said over email in answer to my questions. “That sign is no longer needed.

More:Fort Bragg officials are permanently closing this gate. Here's why.

“There is another sign in front of Butner Gate (going outbound) that is also obsolete and will soon be taken down.”

Cheryle Rivas, public affairs director added: “What you are seeing with this sign is part of the normal upkeep of the base.”

Got it.

Still, it is a reminder that things are going to change, and sooner than some people may be ready.

Fort Bragg is among 10 Army installations that are changing their names in accordance with a federal law passed in the 2020 defense budget. It mandates replacing base names, street names and other features on military installations that are associated with the Confederacy.

‘I always felt very proud’

As for the wooden Bragg entrance signs: They take Danielle Fernnen back. She helped design them in the 1990s in her job with Blashfield Sign Co., a local company that over the years has handled numerous contracts with the post.

Fernnen was back then a recent graduate of Fayetteville Technical Community College — were she took a design class that she now teaches at FTCC.

“Having worked on those signs, especially as a brand-new designer, it was like one of my first jobs and one of my first notable things I’ve done — I always felt very proud,” she says. “We would see news reporters or other news media standing in front of that sign. Or the newspaper would publish the signage.

“I did feel attached to the signage.”

She talked about the process.

“We typographically designed the signs,” she said. “Somebody before me probably started that, and then I carried that on.”

They would carve out the pattern for the letters from a linoleum block.

“We had rolls of this adhesive linoleum that was meant for sandblasting,” she said, describing a technique of using high pressure to smooth and shape material. “All the signs were sandblasted.”

When the letters were done, “we’d apply them to these big wooden structures that were built in-house.”

She said sandblasted signs in the late '90s was her boss Matt Blashfield’s niche in this market.

Fennern said she was “feeling a little nostalgic.”

But, she added, she was nevertheless happy to see the post change its name

“At the time, I had not ever considered the naming,” she said. “I just understood Fort Bragg and its role in this community but not the person it was named after. It wasn’t even a thought to me.

“Now that I know more about who it was named after — I’m happy to see the change.”

Life goes on

As I have written, I also support the name change. My view is fairly simple: U.S. military installations should be named for people who fought for the country and not against it.

The committee that rechristened Bragg happened to choose an ideal and not a person.

I am not going to pretend I won’t miss to some degree the familiarity of the Bragg name, as we tend to do with things that we grew up with. It’s all I knew. As a kid, I didn’t think anything about wearing a Dixie Youth patch on my baseball jersey, but that’s not acceptable for children now.

Not surprisingly, I guess, some people cannot let it go. I have seen on social media people say they will always call it “Fort Bragg.”

To that I say — OK.

None of us is going to live forever on this earth. The next generations will see our post as Fort Liberty, and those who bother to learn the old name will wonder why we ever named Army installations after Confederates who fought for chattel slavery — a crime against humanity in every respect.

As for the renaming, I was not enthused about the specific name Liberty initially. But when one considers the ideology of Gen. Braxton Bragg and his fellow rebels, Liberty is a rather eloquent response.

Either way, life will go on.

I look forward to the new Fort Liberty signs while pouring out a little liquor for the old ones.

Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Pitts: Signs of the times at Fort Bragg a reminder name change coming