FORT MCKAVETT — Earlier this week, I found myself bouncing around in a golf cart on the manicured grounds of this frontier fort northwest of Junction, pausing at restored barracks of whitewashed stone, handsome officers’ quarters and a small, well-designed museum in what used to be the fort hospital. My guide and driver was the site’s educator/curator, Kevin Malcolm, a young man who takes obvious pride in the history he oversees. He calls Fort McKavett “the hidden gem among Texas forts.”
He’s right on both counts: The state historic site is a gem and it’s hidden. When I stepped out of the car early Wednesday morning, I heard — nothing. No traffic noise, no people sounds, not even bird sounds in the stands of live oak, mesquite and cedar just beyond the grounds.
Malcolm tells me that McKavett, arguably the best-preserved frontier fort in the state, gets between 15 and 40 visitors — a week. He and I wandered around for a couple of hours and nobody showed up. It was a weekday and hot, but I got the impression visitors are a rarity most days. That’s partly because the fort is a 40-mile detour off the nearest interstate — most travelers on Interstate-10 just want to keep on truckin’ — and also because, unlike Fort Griffin and other state historic sites, McKavett doesn’t offer camping facilities.
Malcolm, a 29-year-old Aggie grad, is obsessed with all things military and with history, particularly Texas military history. With journals, papers and documents from the fort’s archive at his disposal and with 21 venerable limestone structures to look after, he’s in the right place, to be sure.
In the 1840s, German immigrants to this rugged western edge of the Hill Country were promised paradise among the grass-covered hills and clear, spring-fed streams. What they might not have understood is that paradise was perched on the precarious far edge of the frontier. Their homes, farms and small hamlets, if they managed to survive, would be a buffer zone between civilization back east and Comanches just over the next hill. Fort McKavett was a bead, so to speak, along a string of frontier forts the U.S. Army established to protect both immigrant settlements and travelers along the “upper road” from San Antonio to El Paso.
Built in 1852 on a hill above the south bank of the San Saba River, McKavett was considered one of the healthiest forts on the frontier. Cool breezes, pure spring water and a 36-acre vegetable garden on an island between the river and a tributary helped make frontier life bearable for 600 soldiers, including officers and their families and assorted fort personnel. Gen. William T. Sherman once described McKavett as “the prettiest post in Texas.”
In 1876, Elliott Roosevelt, Teddy’s sickly younger brother, visited Fort McKavett seeking relief from his chronic asthma. He loved the place, and only “good taste,” a chronicler recalled, prompted him to leave.
“He loved to watch the wiggle-tailed prairie dogs, always a source of never-ending amusement to him,” a writer named M.L. Crimmins wrote in a 1944 edition of Southwestern Historical Quarterly, “and he made no attempt to shoot them, as many thoughtless people do, for they are not considered edible, except in an emergency.”
Presumably, Roosevelt did not visit Scabtown, the scruffy, little settlement down the hill from the fort. With its gambling houses, saloons and bordellos and with assorted camp followers occupying shacks and dugouts along the river, it was everything the local temperance group warned young soldiers to avoid. Even though the group’s meeting hall was on the path headed downhill from the fort, I’m assuming the soldiers kept on walking, spurning the straight and narrow.
By the late 1850s, the Penateka Comanche had withdrawn from the Hill Country, and in 1859 McKavett was ordered abandoned. Civilian families living in the area took over the post buildings.
The fort reopened in 1868 when hostilities between settlers and the Comanches flared up again after the Civil War. Soldiers of the 41st infantry, commanded by Col. Ranald MacKenzie, arrived the next year. The 41st was one of the army’s six regiments made up of black enlisted personnel and white officers. According to the website Texas Beyond History, the 41st was a well-drilled regiment when it arrived at McKavett, but it was new to frontier warfare. Soon afterward, the unit consolidated with another black regiment, the 38th, to form the new 24th Infantry. Mackenzie, perhaps the best-known Indian fighter of the post-Civil War era, launched several expeditions from Fort McKavett, usually with black soldiers under his command.
Curator Malcolm likes to tell the story of a Reconstruction-era experiment involving McKavett’s black soldiers. Beginning in 1868, the fort held classes for them in reading, writing and geography. Most were freed slaves; just a few years earlier, teaching them to read and write would have been illegal. After the Army abandoned McKavett in 1883, the classroom building became the local public school. It stayed open until 1953.
Once the Army left for good, civilians — including the more stable of the Scabtown merchants — took over the abandoned buildings, and Fort McKavett became a small but thriving commercial center for the Edwards Plateau sheep- and goat-raising industry. After the railroads passed it by, population peaked at about 150. That was nearly a century ago.
Fort McKavett became a ghost town where shoving over old stone walls became a popular Saturday-night pastime for area high-school kids. The venerable two-story residence of the fort’s commanding officer, now the most prominent ruin on the site, burned decades after civilians moved in. Its occupants had left a fire burning on the stove when they raced to a neighbor’s house to listen to urgent breaking news on the radio. The date was Dec. 7, 1941.
Years ago, my daughters and I spent a weekend night in one of the Fort McKavett buildings during a brief period when the state apparently was trying to figure out how to make historic sites self-sustaining. Heather recalls waking up on that Sunday morning eye to eye with a tarantula on the windowsill inches from her bed. She hasn’t been back since, although that could be because she lives in LA.
I saw no tarantulas this week, but I did see a fascinating historic site that deserves more attention than it gets. Sherman and other old soldiers who knew the place, including Gen. Abner Doubleday (who did not invent baseball), would likely tell you, as would a president’s younger brother, that Fort McKavett is well worth a detour off the Interstate.
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