Smith-Carlton Adobe House
Fort Davis, Jeff Davis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1873, Archie Smith, a former Buffalo Soldier in the 24th U.S. Infantry at Fort Davis, built a home on 160 acres near the base of Dolores Mountain using local materials. Native oak beams support the near-rectangular one-story adobe. A large room with a vaulted ceiling was a private chapel for Smith’s wife. It was also open to other denominations and Catholic masses before St. Joseph was built. In 1911, Emmett H. Carlton bought the property and built a new home, using the Smith house as a barn and stabilizing its walls with a lime plaster. Don and Vida Carlton occupied the house after restoring it in the early 1970s. The house is notable as the oldest home still in use as a residence in Fort Davis. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2013
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1873, a former Buffalo Soldier of the 24th U.S. Infantry named Archie Smith claimed 160 acres near Dolores Mountain in the Trans-Pecos country and raised an adobe home with native oak beams. Its vaulted room served as a family chapel open to neighbors of every denomination before the town's first Catholic church was built. Later owners, the Carltons, preserved and eventually restored the structure, which survives as the oldest home still lived in at Fort Davis.
Why it matters
It ties the story of the Buffalo Soldiers — Black cavalry and infantry who garrisoned the western frontier — to the everyday work of homesteading and community-building in far West Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years after the Civil War, the far Trans-Pecos country of West Texas was one of the most remote and contested corners of the United States. The federal government maintained a chain of frontier forts here to guard travel routes and mail roads across a vast, dry landscape, and around those garrisons small communities of soldiers, settlers, and freedpeople began to take root. Fort Davis, tucked among the mountains, was one of the most important of these posts.
This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, when the promise of Western land drew people of every background to try their hand at homesteading. For newly freed African Americans, the West offered something the postwar South often denied: the chance to own land outright, to build on it, and to worship freely. Claiming 160 acres and raising a home from the earth itself was an act of independence as much as survival.
The building materials tell the story of the place. In a country with little timber, people built with what the ground gave them — adobe walls plastered thick against heat and cold, roofed and beamed with whatever native wood could be found. A house like this was quite literally made of its own landscape.
People & events
In 1873, a man named Archie Smith — a former Buffalo Soldier who had served in the 24th U.S. Infantry at Fort Davis — built a home on 160 acres near the base of Dolores Mountain. He raised a near-rectangular, one-story adobe supported by beams of local oak, using the materials at hand to make something meant to last. It has, in fact, outlasted nearly everything around it: the marker notes it as the oldest home still in use as a residence in Fort Davis.
One feature sets Smith's house apart. A large room with a vaulted ceiling served as a private chapel for his wife — and, notably, it was open to other denominations and hosted Catholic Mass before the town's own Catholic church was built. In a small frontier community, that room made the Smith home a gathering place of faith for neighbors of many beliefs.
The house passed through later hands that valued it. In 1911, Emmett H. Carlton bought the property, built a new home, and preserved the old Smith house as a barn, stabilizing its walls with lime plaster — an act of practical stewardship that kept it standing. Decades later, in the early 1970s, Don and Vida Carlton restored the structure and made it a residence once more, closing a loop of care that stretched across a full century.
Its place in the American story
The Buffalo Soldiers — the African American cavalry and infantry regiments who garrisoned the western frontier after the Civil War — hold a singular place in the American story. They served a nation that had only recently freed them and still denied them full citizenship, guarding roads and settlements across some of the harshest country on the continent. Their history is usually told through military campaigns; this marker tells it through something quieter and just as important: what a soldier did when his service ended.
Archie Smith laid down the uniform and took up the homesteader's life, and in doing so he joined one of the great movements of the era — Black Americans claiming land and building communities in the West. His adobe chapel, open to all faiths, embodies how these frontier settlements were knit together across lines of denomination and, implicitly, of race and origin.
That the house still stands, still lived in, is its own kind of monument. It connects the sweeping national narrative of emancipation, military service, and westward settlement to a single durable structure you can point to — proof that ordinary people building ordinary homes are the ones who actually made the frontier into a country.
If you visit
Fort Davis sits high in the mountains of far West Texas, and part of the reward of coming here is simply the landscape — the clear light, the rocky peaks, the sense of distance. This marker asks you to see the country the way a homesteader did in 1873: as a place to be built from its own earth.
Notice, in the story, the details that make an adobe house: the native oak beams, the thick plastered walls, the vaulted room that once served as a chapel. Adobe architecture is one of the signatures of the Southwest, and a structure this old — the oldest home still in use in the town — is a rare survivor of the very first generation of settlement here.
The Fort Davis area is rich ground for a history-minded road trip, with the frontier fort itself and the surrounding mountain country close at hand. Let this marker remind you, as you go, that the region's past isn't only about the soldiers who garrisoned the fort but about the lives they built afterward — and about a Buffalo Soldier whose home outlived the frontier that made it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Archie Smith
- · Emmett H. Carlton
- · Don Carlton
- · Vida Carlton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fort Davis
Fort Davis, TX
Fort Davis was established in 1854 to guard travelers on the San Antonio–El Paso Road and named for Jefferson Davis, then U.S. Secretary of War. Federal troops abandoned it at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and reoccupied it in 1867, after which its soldiers—including Black regulars—helped bring stability to the far West Texas frontier until the post was deactivated in 1891. Its ruins and restored buildings remain among the best-preserved frontier military posts in the Southwest.
Apache Last Stand
Presidio County, TX
On June 12, 1880, in the rugged Big Bend country of Presidio County, four Pueblo Indian scouts serving under General Benjamin H. Grierson fought and turned back a band of twenty Apache warriors. The marker records it as the last Apache stand in the county — a small but telling episode in the long, grinding conclusion of the Indian Wars in far West Texas. It reflects the era when the U.S. Army relied heavily on Native scouts to fight other Native peoples.
Fort Pena Colorada (Red Rock)
Marathon, TX
Established in 1880 in the rugged Big Bend country, Fort Peña Colorada guarded the water and passes near Marathon against raids across the Mexican border. Apaches struck the post in 1881 during the last years of the Indian Wars in far West Texas. With the frontier considered pacified, the fort was abandoned in 1893.
Alamo Letter Statue
Pecos, TX
This courthouse statue in Pecos honors the famous 'Alamo letter,' William Barret Travis's 1836 appeal from the besieged mission at San Antonio de Béxar, signed 'Victory or Death.' Written during the Texas Revolution as a small garrison faced the Mexican army, the letter became one of the most stirring documents in Texas history. Its placement before a West Texas courthouse reflects how deeply the Alamo's defiance entered the state's civic identity.