Camp Marion was a twenty-four acre Prisoners of War camp established on the grounds of the Marion Engineer Depot, a major supply and logistics site of the U.S. Army Engineers during World War II. The first contingent of POWs arrived in December 1944, consisting of two hundred and fifty men, many of them Germans who had served in the Afrika Korps Panzer Division. POWs served in many capacities at Camp Marion, including construction, cooking, cleaning, maintenance, office tasks around the depot, and labor on local farms, where farmers provided food to supplement sometimes inadequate rations so the men would have enough energy to work a full day. By 1946 Camp Marion could hold five hundred Prisoners of War. The camp included housing, recreational areas, a canteen, and a small store where POWs could buy items with coupons received for their pay of eighty cents a day. They also had soccer teams, their favorite sport, and an arts and crafts center where some made gifts for local people, including oil paintings and jewelry boxes. These cultural exchanges were a positive experience for the Marion area, and despite rules against fraternizing, friendships formed with POWs continued into the 1990s. By March 1946 Camp Marion had closed, the Marion Engineer Depot closed in 1960, and in 1989 the site was purchased from the United States government and developed as the Marion Industrial Center.