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BRINGING BACK THE BARRACKS THE BARRACKS AT FORT CHAFFEE words Dwain Hebda images Rival CRE and courtesy Lloyd Sumpter
For eight years in the Oklahoma Army National Guard, Lloyd Sumpter honed his soldiering skills at Fort Chaffee in Fort Smith. He couldn’t have known then that life would lead him back to these very grounds, but looking back, he sees the experience as a formative one in his life overall. “From 1987 to ‘95 our unit would come train at Fort Chaffee, and our summer training camps would be held here as well,” Lloyd says. “I served here with my father, Larry, who’s a Vietnam vet. When I was in high school, he was in the National Guard, so I joined to serve with him. Both he and I served at Chaffee.” Lloyd, president of Rival CRE LLC, has now come full circle to the historic military address. Over the past four years, he has assembled or has under contract twenty-five former buildings on the base, which he is transforming to become The Barracks at Chaffee. The development will include retail, multi-family housing, and restaurant/brewery businesses in a walkable, mixed-use development. “[The barracks are] a nice blank slate to start with,” he says. “The location is excellent, we’re less than two miles from the medical college where there's going to be over one thousand students this fall and a staff of one hundred and ninety people. We’re going to be an area, with the retail and restaurants, to service the college and all the other 3,500 houses on this side of Fort Smith.”
DOSOUTHMAGAZINE.COM
