World War I began to affect Chesterfield County on April 6, 1917, when the National Selective Service Act was enacted. With no home guard and no pre-war military organization, the county’s first effort to form an infantry unit began at a recruiting center in the 1749 county courthouse, which was demolished in 1917. Volunteers joined units such as the Richmond Grays or the Petersburg Grays, while others waited for the draft. More than 1,480 men registered for the draft, and 161 were selected. On October 26, 1917, when the cornerstone for the new courthouse was laid, one hundred drafted men were encamped on the courthouse grounds and a parade was held. Recruits went to various army regiments, including the 80th Mountain Division at Camp Lee in Petersburg, Virginia, and to National Guard units stationed across the nation. Some soldiers who fought in France remained there until 1919, nearly a year after the Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918. In 1917, the U.S. Army also leased more than 4,000 acres in Chesterfield County for training. The 313th Field Artillery occupied the Civil War Confederate fort known as Parker’s Battery and fired into the swamps at Dutch Gap. J. Thompson Brown, a Richmond businessman who had served in Parker’s Battery during the Civil War and later bought the land, wrote to Major General Aldebert Cronkite of Camp Lee asking that the trees, earthworks, and battery redoubt be spared and protected because to surviving veterans in and around Richmond the place was sacred and hallowed. Parker’s Battery still exists as a unit of the Richmond National Battlefield Park.