A familiar name reappears on highway signs in and around Fayetteville
Two years ago, the N.C. Department of Transportation had to change dozens of highway signs after the Army’s Fort Bragg was renamed Fort Liberty.
Now it’s changing them back.
The Trump administration’s decision to revive the Fort Bragg name has forced NCDOT to redo about 120 highway signs in and around Fayetteville. For about a third of the signs, that simply means removing the “Fort Liberty” sheet that was laid over the old “Fort Bragg” in 2023, said spokesman Andrew Barksdale.
The rest involve installing either a new sign or another overlay to cover up Fort Liberty, Barksdale said.
The switch began this week with signs along Interstate 95 and should be done by fall. The state estimates it will cost about $125,000.
The original Fort Bragg was named for Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general and native North Carolinian, in 1918, when it was known as Camp Bragg.
It became Fort Liberty after Congress created a Defense Department commission to rename military bases, ships, streets and other assets named for Confederate soldiers. President Donald Trump vetoed the legislation that created the commission, but the veto was easily overridden in both the House and Senate.
Trump vowed that if he was re-elected he would change the name of the country’s largest military installation back to Bragg. Three weeks after Trump took office again, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the change.
This time, though, the base is named for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a paratrooper who was stationed at Fort Bragg during World War II. Bragg, a native of Maine, received a Silver Star for valor in combat during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1945.
NCDOT will not keep the Fort Liberty signs it takes down, Barksdale said.
“Because we don’t have the capacity in our warehouses to store a lot of signs, we will follow our normal procedure of recycling this material to use for other signs,” he wrote in an email.
As for the old Fort Bragg signs?
“We recycled them in 2023, not thinking we would need them again,” Barksdale said.
This story was originally published July 18, 2025 at 11:04 AM with the headline "A familiar name reappears on highway signs in and around Fayetteville."
