Las Moras Masonic Lodge Building
Brackettville, Kinney County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1878-1879 to serve as the first County-owned Courthouse for Kinney County. This structure served that purpose for thirty-two years. In 1911 it became the headquarters of the Las Moras Masonic Lodge, which was chartered in 1876. While the Lodge used the second floor, the ground floor was leased to the U.S. Postal Service for the Brackettville Post Office from 1918 to 1983. Over the years the building has also served as office space for Kinney County government departments.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Raised in 1878–1879 as the first county-owned courthouse for Kinney County on the far Texas frontier near Fort Clark, this sturdy building served the county for three decades. In 1911 it passed to the Las Moras Masonic Lodge, chartered in 1876, while its ground floor housed the Brackettville post office from 1918 to 1983. Across more than a century it has held courts, lodge meetings, mail, and county offices — a single building carrying much of a frontier town's civic life.
Why it matters
It captures how a remote frontier county concentrated government, fraternal, and federal functions under one roof for over a hundred years.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Kinney County Courthouse
Brackettville, TX
Kinney County's roots run from ancient Indigenous inhabitation through Spanish expeditions beginning in 1535 to the 1852 opening of Fort Clark, an Army outpost that anchored settlement along the San Antonio–El Paso stage line. The county organized in 1873 with meetings held first in a settler's home, choosing Brackettville as its seat. In 1911 the county occupied this Beaux Arts Classical courthouse—buff brick accented with red banding, an octagonal-towered design topped by a Seth Thomas clock—built by a Dallas architect and a Louisville contractor.
Montalvo House
Brackettville, TX
Around 1887 Yldefonso Montalvo, also known as Obed Woods, built this house from cedar pickets and caliche plaster gathered close at hand. The educated son of an English mother and a Mexican father, he worked as a rancher and for nearby Fort Clark and a local store, raising nine children here with his wife Guadalupe. The dwelling reflects the resourceful vernacular building of the Texas borderlands.
Las Moras Spring
Brackettville, TX
Las Moras Spring, the largest in Kinney County and ninth largest in Texas, has drawn people for more than 11,000 years, from flint-knapping prehistoric hunters to Coahuiltecan, Apache, and Comanche peoples following trails into Mexico. Spanish expeditions recorded stops here, and in 1840 Republic of Texas troops destroyed a Comanche village at the spring. Fort Clark rose beside it in 1852, and the Army later walled the pool and built a huge WPA swimming pool in 1939.
1886 Kitchen/Mess Hall
Brackettville, TX
When Fort Clark's soldiers first cooked over open fires along Las Moras Creek, mess was a rough affair, but in 1886 the Army built nine sturdy limestone kitchens and mess halls, one for each company of enlisted men. This surviving building, quarried from local stone with timber lintels and twin chimneys for cooking and heat, later served as day rooms, offices, and supply storage. It stands as one of eight that remain from a frontier post guarding the Texas–Mexico borderlands.