Bob Stone Camp
Nocona, Montague County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1880, the Bob Stone Camp began in Montague County as a means for Confederate veterans of the Civil War to gather. Named in honor of deceased Col. Bob Stone, the camp hosted annual summer reunions for veterans and their families in the area. By 1893, the Bob Stone Camp joined the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), a national association. In 1899, Nocona became the permanent home of the Bob Stone Camp, on land west of town donated by D.C. Jordan. Summer programs featured presentations and events attended by Confederate and Union veterans, families and friends from north Texas and Oklahoma. The Bob Stone Camp was active until the last local Civil War veterans died in the 1940s. (2019)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1880 and named for the late Col. Bob Stone, this camp gave Confederate veterans of Montague County a place to gather for annual summer reunions with their families. It joined the national United Confederate Veterans in 1893 and settled permanently at Nocona in 1899 on donated land. Notably, its programs drew both Confederate and Union veterans from north Texas and Oklahoma, and the camp stayed active until the last local Civil War veterans died in the 1940s.
Why it matters
The camp shows how a generation of Civil War veterans processed the war through memory and reunion, and how old adversaries sometimes shared the same fairgrounds a lifetime later.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1880, the Civil War was fifteen years past, and the men who had fought it were entering middle age. Across the South, and in a Texas that had sent thousands into Confederate service, veterans began forming associations to hold onto one another and to the defining experience of their youth. Montague County, in north Texas near the Red River and the Oklahoma line, was frontier country in those years, freshly settled and still close to its origins.
The impulse to gather was powerful and widespread. War leaves survivors bound by something civilians cannot fully share, and the veterans of the 1860s were no exception. Reunion camps and old-soldier associations sprang up everywhere in the decades after the war, offering a yearly return to comrades who understood.
This marker records one such gathering. Founded in 1880 and named in honor of the late Colonel Bob Stone, the Bob Stone Camp gave the Confederate veterans of the area a place to meet, and the annual summer reunion it hosted became a fixture of the region's life.
People & events
The camp took its name from Colonel Bob Stone, already deceased when it was founded, so that the very act of gathering was also an act of memory. From its start in 1880 the camp drew veterans and their families to annual summer reunions, the kind of event that anchored a community's calendar for decades.
In 1893 the Bob Stone Camp joined the United Confederate Veterans, the national association that coordinated such groups across the South, tying this north Texas gathering into a much larger network. Then, in 1899, the camp found a permanent home when D.C. Jordan donated land west of the town of Nocona for its use. A wandering reunion now had ground of its own.
What happened at those summer programs is the most striking part of the story. Alongside presentations and events, the reunions drew not only Confederate veterans and their families from north Texas and Oklahoma but Union veterans as well. Old adversaries, men who had once faced each other in war, shared the same summer grounds. The camp stayed active until the last local Civil War veterans died in the 1940s, and with them the living memory it had preserved.
Its place in the American story
The story of the Bob Stone Camp is really the story of how a whole American generation processed its war, not through histories or monuments alone but through the ritual of reunion. For decades, aging veterans returned each summer to sit among people who had lived the same thing, turning memory into a shared and public act. Multiply this one camp by the thousands of similar gatherings, North and South, and you have one of the central social phenomena of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America.
The detail that Union and Confederate veterans attended the same programs speaks to a genuine and complicated national current. In the decades after the war, a spirit of reconciliation grew among the survivors, expressed in joint reunions and shared commemorations. Men who had fought on opposing sides found, in old age, a common ground in simply having been there. That reconciliation carried its own silences and limits, but as a lived fact among veterans it was real, and this camp witnessed it.
The association's lifespan is its own kind of monument. It lasted exactly as long as the men it served, ending in the 1940s when the last of the local veterans died. An institution built entirely on living memory could not outlive the people who carried it, and its quiet close marks the moment the Civil War passed fully out of firsthand recollection and into history.
If you visit
The marker stands near Nocona in Montague County, in the rolling north Texas country not far from the Red River and the Oklahoma border. This is memorial ground rather than a preserved site, so come prepared to use your imagination more than your camera. Somewhere on the donated land west of town, generations of families once spread out for summer reunions.
Stand a moment and picture those gatherings: canvas and shade, presentations and speeches, and among the crowd old men in whom the war of the 1860s was still a personal memory. The most poignant thing to hold in mind is that on these grounds former enemies met as fellow survivors, sharing the same summer air a lifetime after the fighting.
The marker fits naturally into a drive through north Texas and across into Oklahoma, the same country the reunions drew from. It rewards the traveler willing to pause over a memorial and think about memory itself, and about how a community chose to keep faith with a vanishing generation right up until the last of them was gone.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Col. Bob Stone
- · D.C. Jordan
Themes & tags
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