Fort D.A. Russell

🏛️The era

In the early 1910s, the Big Bend country of far West Texas was about as remote as any place in the United States. It had huge ranches, thin grass, high desert mountains, and a railroad town called Marfa. Just across the Rio Grande, Mexico was being torn apart by revolution. The fighting that began in 1910 went on for years, and it sent refugees, raiders, and rumors north across a border that had very little guarding it.

Washington answered by sending soldiers. Small patrol stations spread along the river, and those outposts needed a supply base behind them. In 1911 Camp Marfa became that base, a place where food, fodder, and equipment could come in by rail and go out to the men watching the border.

While the Revolution lasted, the Army on the border still rode horses, and Camp Marfa was a cavalry camp. The decades that followed changed almost everything about the American military, from horses to engines and from border skirmishes to global war. This one desert post lived through each of those shifts in turn.

👥People & events

The man the fort was named for never saw West Texas. David Allen Russell was a career Army officer who became a Union general in the Civil War. He was killed in 1864 during the fighting around Winchester, Virginia. When the Army made its Marfa camp a permanent post in 1929, it chose his name, following its long habit of honoring fallen officers.

The post's fortunes rose and fell with Army budgets. It was deactivated at the end of 1933, in the depths of the Depression, and reopened in 1935 with artillery units. The cavalry era was ending, and the hoofbeats of Camp Marfa's early years gave way to the heavy work of moving and firing big guns.

World War II brought the biggest change. Fort Russell became a training camp, and new kinds of soldiers came to the desert, including a chemical warfare battalion. German prisoners of war also came. They were among the many thousands of captured enemy soldiers held in camps across the American interior during the war. For a few years this remote corner of Texas sat, in its own way, inside the machinery of a world war.

The war ended, and the need for the post ended with it. The fort officially closed in October 1946, after about thirty-five years spent following wherever the nation's military needs led.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Fort D.A. Russell tells the story of the twentieth-century U.S. Army in one place. It began as a supply depot for border patrols during the Mexican Revolution, a period that shaped U.S.-Mexico relations for a generation. It then moved from horse cavalry to artillery, the same modernization the whole Army went through between the world wars.

Its World War II years show how far that war reached into American life. Training camps and POW camps were often placed in thinly settled regions where land was cheap and open, and the West Texas desert was a natural fit. Americans who never left home still lived close to the war through places like this.

The fort's story did not end in 1946. Its buildings later found a second life in the arts, and that life has made Marfa known far beyond Texas. A military post built for a border crisis now draws travelers from around the world, which is an unusual path for any piece of American history.

🧭If you visit

Marfa sits high on the plateau of far West Texas, and part of the reward is the drive itself: long empty roads, huge skies, and mountains on the horizon. Give yourself time. This is a place to slow down, not to hurry through.

The former fort lies at the edge of town. Look for the low, practical buildings typical of an Army post. Many of them have since been adapted for art, and the best-known is the Chinati Foundation, which artist Donald Judd set up on the old fort grounds. As you walk the grounds, picture cavalry horses, then artillery crews, then soldiers and prisoners in wartime, all on the same patch of desert.

Marfa pairs well with a larger Big Bend road trip, including the Davis Mountains to the north and the Rio Grande border country to the south, where the patrols this post once supplied kept watch. Check current access and tour arrangements before you go, since parts of the old fort grounds are privately managed.