Camp Crowder Gymnasium

About this property

The Camp Crowder Gymnasium is a historic school building at 205 Shiloh Drive in Sulphur Springs, Benton County, Arkansas. It is primarily a building with local significance, and also is a rare example of military construction in the small community. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011. === 1940s‒1946: Camp Crowder, Neosho, Missouri === The gymnasium was built in the early 1940s at the Camp Crowder military base in Neosho, Missouri for military troops to use as a gymnasium and theater. In June 1946, the US War Assets Administration sold buildings and surplus war materials at two Kansas locations and at Camp Crowder in Missouri. At the public sale attended by 2,900 people, they sold 1,004 buildings. John Elward Brown Sr. bought the gymnasium for the Brown Military Academy of the Ozarks. The gymnasium was disassembled and moved to the academy. === 1946‒1951: Brown Military Academy of the Ozarks === John Elward Brown Sr. established John Brown University is Siloam Springs, Arkansas and in 1924 he also established another school in nearby Sulphur Springs. That school changed names and goals several times over the next decade but in 1937, it became the Brown Military Academy of the Ozarks, a co-educational military academy for high school students. The campus included the former 100-room Kihlberg hotel and the former 30-room Livingston hotel. Brown bought the gymnasium and it was reassembled on the academy's campus for use as a gymnasium and school theater. However, the academy was not performing well financially and in 1951 Brown closed it and sold the campus for a small amount of money to William Cameron Townsend. === 1951‒1964: Camp Wycliffe (SIL International) === In 1935, shortly before Brown changed his Sulphur Springs school to a military academy, William Cameron Townsend started Camp Wycliffe (later named Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL International at a farmhouse in Sulphur Springs. The summer camp trained people in linguistics and Biblical translation, and to prepare them to become missionaries in other countries―from phonetics and philology, to religious prayer, to making furniture and taking ten-mile hikes around the area. In the 1950s, SIL International had grown substantially, with training schools in Canada, Australia, and the UK. Brown sold them his entire Sulphur Springs campus to them and his personal off-campus home in the town (Shiloh House), and they used the gymnasium as a recreation hall for the students and faculty there. In 1964, SIL International prepared to move their headquarters to Huntington Beach, California and sold the property to Copeland Development, which went bankrupt. In 1968, it was sold to Shiloh Trust.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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