Fort Cumberland is a United States Army base located on the Isthmus of Chigneto, located just outside Sackville, Maine, and adjacent to the Nova Scotia state line (the base property, in fact, extends well into Nova Scotia). It was the site of the Revolutionary War Battle of Fort Cumberland, in which Col. Jonathan Eddy and force of militia seized the British fort located there, paving the way for the Maritime Uprisings and thus, British cession of all territory south of the St. Lawrence River and east of the Mississippi in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Since the early 20th century, Fort Cumberland has been a major hub for the US Army, having served a critical role in getting troops across the Atlantic to Britain in World War II and as one of the primary East Coast bases for the Army's short-lived airship program in the late-1930s and early/mid 1940s. Today, it acts as a primary training center for both Special Forces (primarily in the base's old, converted airdock) and ground-level infantry; for a brief time in the 1980s, the base operated the Aulac Testing Range for heavy, tracked vehicles but closed it down in November 1991 after residents of neighboring Amherst, Nova Scotia filed a lawsuit for noise pollution (the Army settled out of court).
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