Former United States Naval Training Center, Bainbridge (USNTC Bainbridge)

United States Naval Training Center, Bainbridge (USNTC Bainbridge) was the US Navy Training Center located at Port Deposit, Maryland, on the bluffs of the northeast bank of the Susquehanna River.

The training center occupied the former campus of the Tome School for boys. Its was ideally located in the militarized U.S. East Coast of World War II.

A total of 24,484 recruit graduates were trained and graduated during World War II with technical skills under the direction of the Service School Command.

After World War II, the center was deactivated in 1947, and the only school remaining at the center was then the Naval Academy Prep School, which continued to operate at Bainbridge until it was moved to Newport, Rhode Island, in October 1949.

Since the center’s closing in 1947, a maintenance staff remained to protect the buildings from weather and other damage. In mid-1950, with the advent of the Korean War crisis, plans were made to reactivate the center, and it was officially reopened on February 1, 1951.

In 1962, a Naval Nuclear Power School was installed on the center, but was eventually moved to the Naval Training Center at Orlando, Florida. The Center was deactivated in 1976, after which the center’s facilities were used by the Department of Labor as a Job Corps Training Center on part of the installation until 1990.

On November 3, 1986, the United States Congress authorized the Secretary of the Navy to dispose of the NTCB (Naval Training Center, Bainbridge) facility by sale to private parties or transfer to other government agencies. NTCB is the Federal Facilities equivalent of a brownfield site with the primary goal of the Navy being effective re-use of the former property by the State of Maryland and the people of Cecil County. Congress specified that before any sale, the Secretary of the Navy was required to “restore such property to a condition that meets all applicable Federal and State of Maryland environmental protection regulations" (Public Law 99-956). The U.S. Navy has transferred this site to the Bainbridge Development Corporation. The cleanup is complete.