U.S. Army to honor Fort A.P. Hill’s 3 new namesakes

CAROLINE COUNTY, Va. (WRIC) -- The U.S. Army will honor the three new namesakes of Fort A.P. Hill in Caroline County on Wednesday.

At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 27, army officials will hold a redesignation ceremony as Fort Walker returns to its original name of Fort A.P. Hill -- though it's now an abbreviation for "Fort Anderson-Pinn-Hill" -- in honor of three Medal of Honor recipients.

Section 1749(a) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 prohibited "names related to the Confederacy" from being used on military installations. In compliance with that act, the U.S. Army renamed several of its bases. This included three Central Virginia bases.

Among them was a base in Caroline County, which was originally named Fort A.P. Hill after Ambrose Powell Hill, Jr., a Confederate general. It was renamed Fort Walker in August 2023 after Civil War surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient Mary Walker.

In mid-June, President Donald Trump announced that he wanted to restore the Confederate names to these bases. However, he still had to comply with the act's prohibition on such names.

Using what a historian previously described to 8News as a technical workaround, the Trump administration returned each base's original name by identifying soldiers whose last names matched the original Confederate's.

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Fort A.P. Hill was a bit of an outlier. While all other bases now have a single new namesake, the U.S. Army named three individuals for the Caroline installation: "Fort Anderson-Pinn-Hill" honors Lt. Col. Edward Hill, 1st Sgt. Robert A. Pinn and Pvt. Bruce Anderson.

Each of these three namesakes separately “executed significant actions” during Cold Harbor, Chapin’s Farm and Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in support of the U.S. Army during the Civil War, according to a previous press release from the U.S. Army. They all received Medals of Honor.