Historical Society sponsoring program about Camp Ellis on Sunday at Quincy Senior Center

QUINCY — The Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County will present a program on Camp Ellis, a former World War II Army Service Forces Unit Training Center in western Illinois, at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 15, in the Senior and Family Resource Center, at 639 York. The program is free and open to the public.

Presenters Marion Cornelius, curator of the Easley Pioneer Museum in Ipava, and Julie Terstriep, principal docent of the Camp Ellis section of the museum, will discuss the “lost city.”

The program will have the history of obtaining the site and construction of the camp, built in 1941 on 17,500 acres of farmland in the area around Ipava, Table Grove and Bernadotte.

Bill Kramer from LaPrairie will attend the event and join Cornelius and Terstriep for a question-and-answer session following the program. Kramer, who turns 100 years old on Nov. 1, served as a guard in the German prisoner of war sector at Camp Ellis.

The center trained Army medical personnel, quartermasters and engineers. It also was a prisoner of war camp, housing close to 7,500 prisoners during the war. In its heyday, the camp included 2,200 buildings, a hospital, an airport and water and sewage systems. It has a radio station and newspaper and consistently scheduled popular entertainers and sports figures to energize the troops.