Historic Markers in Texas

Eagle Pass, TX

Fort Duncan was established in 1849 by Captain S. Burbank of the First U.S. Infantry to guard the Rio Grande frontier and the western lines of communication opened after the Mexican-American War. Federal troops garrisoned the post until the eve of the Civil War in 1861 and returned in 1868, and it later became known as Camp Eagle Pass. It stood as a linchpin of American military presence on the border for more than a century.

Eagle Pass, TX

Built around 1868 after the U.S. Army reoccupied Fort Duncan following the Civil War, this barracks witnessed aviation history in 1911 when the Army's first military cross-country flight, launched from Fort McIntosh in Laredo, landed nearby. The Army abandoned the post by 1932, and Eagle Pass later turned the barracks into a country club and Boy Scout lodge. During World War II it doubled as an officers' club for the Eagle Pass Army Air Force Advanced Flying School.

Mobeetie, TX

When Fort Elliott was established in 1875 to secure the Texas Panhandle, teamster-merchant J. J. Long was hired to supply its flagpole. He cut two great cedar trees in the breaks near Antelope Hills, thirty miles away, hauled them by wagon, and fashioned this fifty-foot pole. After the fort closed in 1890 Long bought the pole for his store, and it later stood at the Mobeetie school for two decades before being raised again here in 1949.

Cotulla, TX

Established in 1852, this frontier post guarded both the border country and the vital San Antonio–Laredo Road where it crossed the Nueces River at the Huajuco Crossing. Though the army abandoned it in 1854, the site endured: when La Salle County organized in 1880, Fort Ewell was its chief settlement and home to the first courthouse. The writer O. Henry is said to have come here to collect his mail.

Gatesville, TX

After the Mexican-American War, the U.S. Army strung a line of frontier outposts across Texas, and in 1849 it built Fort Gates, the last of that cordon, to shield settlers from raids along the advancing frontier. Named for Mexican-American War veteran Maj. Collinson Reed Gates, the seventeen-building post drew settling families to its protection and became the nucleus of the surrounding community. The garrison moved on in 1852, and in 1854 the settlement it had seeded gave rise to Coryell County, with Gatesville soon becoming the county seat.

Whitney, TX

Fort Graham rose in March 1849 on the site of a Waco Indian village, one of a chain of frontier military posts the U.S. Army planted across Texas as Anglo settlement pushed westward. Established by Brevet Major R. A. Arnold of the Second Dragoons, it honored Lt. Col. William M. Graham, killed at Molino del Rey during the recent war with Mexico. The post was abandoned in 1853 as the frontier line moved farther west, and its barracks were later reconstructed in part from the original stone as a community gathering place.

Whitney, TX

Settlement in this part of Hill County followed the 1849 founding of Fort Graham, a frontier military post abandoned in 1853. The cemetery that took the fort's name holds its first recorded burial in 1879 and, alone among the area's historic graveyards, escaped inundation when Lake Whitney was created in the early 1950s. More than 300 of the region's early settlers and their descendants rest here.

Belton vicinity, TX

In November 1836, just months after Texas won its independence, George B. Erath and twenty Texas Rangers threw up a picket fort on the Little River as a shield for settlers against Indian raids. Known variously as Fort Griffin, Fort Smith, and the Little River Fort, it had been abandoned as a military post by the time the Santa Fe Expedition camped nearby in 1841. Yet frontier families kept using the stockade as a refuge for years afterward.

Albany, TX

Near the U.S. Army's Fort Griffin, which guarded the Texas frontier from 1867 to 1881, a rough town of the same name drew gamblers, trail drivers, and buffalo hunters — and the lawlessness that came with them. Citizens built this thick-walled jail in 1878 to hold the town's rowdier visitors, sometimes as many as eighteen at once. After the town faded it was reduced to a cowshed before being moved here for preservation in 1954.

Albany, TX

In 1938 an Albany High School drama teacher wrote and staged a play dramatizing the settling of the Fort Griffin country, and community backing turned it into the Fort Griffin Fandangle—an all-volunteer outdoor pageant of period costume, livestock, music, and elaborate sets. It became an annual affair, paused only for World War II, and survived even the sudden death of its creator in 1968. Sustained across generations by thousands of Albany residents in every role, it endures as a true people's theatre retelling the area's pioneer story.

Fort Hancock, TX

When the town of Fort Hancock was founded in 1883, a general store opened alongside it, its founder soon becoming the area's first postmaster. Sold to the Hare family in 1916 and passed to their daughter in 1960, the mercantile stayed in continuous operation, stocking both modern goods and old-time staples like horse collars and coffee mills. It stands as the oldest store in Hudspeth County, serving the Mexican border country for generations.

Gatesville, TX

On January 15, 1942, the U.S. Army established a tank destroyer training center near Killeen that became Camp Hood, later Fort Hood. To train tens of thousands of soldiers for World War II combat, the government acquired more than 88,000 acres, taking in about twenty small Coryell County communities settled since the 1850s. Within days and weeks families watched homes and churches vanish and moved beloved dead to new cemeteries, enduring a hard recovery even as they banded together into a lasting community of memory.

Palestine, TX

Around 1836, on the orders of Sam Houston himself, settlers raised a stockade fort on the public square of the frontier town of Houston, deep in what was then Houston County. The fort guarded pioneers on the edge of the young Republic of Texas until it was abandoned about 1841, and the town gave way to Palestine as the county seat a few years later. The old fort site was eventually absorbed into the home of Texas statesman John H. Reagan, who kept the name alive.

Palestine, TX

Raised in 1835–36 as a stockade and heavy-log blockhouse of the fledgling Republic of Texas, Fort Houston protected the settlers who founded the pioneer town of Houston. Friendly Indians came to trade at its walls even as wary families slept inside the twenty-five-foot-square blockhouse, and the men who gathered here formed one of the first Ranger units in Texas. The fort guarded a wide stretch of frontier until it was abandoned about 1841, its ground later folded into the home of statesman John H. Reagan.

Palestine, TX

When Joseph Jordan and William S. McDonald donated some 500 acres in 1835 for the town of Houston—later Fort Houston—the plan set aside a "public burying ground" that survives as the community's last physical trace. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1840, and among those laid to rest are victims of disease and frontier hardship, two San Jacinto veterans in unmarked graves, and, in a soldiers' plot marked by a boulder, veterans of the Republic of Texas and a War of 1812 soldier, General Nathaniel Smith. Though the town was abandoned after Palestine became county seat in 1846, the cemetery remains in use today.

Uvalde, TX

West of San Antonio the road forked toward El Paso and toward Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande, and travelers here "put on their guns" at the edge of contested country. During the Civil War, Fort Inge and Camp Dix anchored a thin Confederate and state defense line stretched a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, guarding against raids while wagon trains hauled cotton to Mexico in exchange for scarce goods. Though Uvalde County had voted heavily against secession, many local men served, and the war years brought hard times and renewed frontier attacks.

Ozona, TX

When Texas seceded and U.S. forts along the frontier were surrendered at the start of the Civil War, Fort Lancaster became part of the Confederacy's thinly held far-western line, garrisoned by the 2nd Texas Cavalry. It guarded the supply route feeding the 1861–62 Confederate campaign into Arizona and New Mexico—an ambitious bid to stretch the Confederacy from ocean to ocean. Between escorting supply trains and watching for Indian raids, soldiers passed dull hours with a camp newspaper and by shooting at coyotes.

Banquete, TX

A Spanish fort rose near a Lipan Apache village on this site in 1728, the settlement bearing an Aztec-derived name. Regarrisoned by Mexican troops around 1831 to discourage Anglo-American colonization, the earthen post became a flashpoint of the Texas Revolution: Texan forces captured it in November 1835 and turned back a counterattack the next day. It saw fighting again in 1842 before being abandoned to ruin.

Austin, TX

In the winter of 1863-64, Confederate engineers threw up this L-shaped earthen fort near Congress Avenue, one of three planned to shield Austin from a feared Union thrust up from the coast. Named for Gen. John Bankhead Magruder, commander of Texas's Confederate forces, it was built by enslaved people supplied by citizens amid wartime labor shortages. When Union forces struck instead from Louisiana's Red River in early 1864, the never-tested fort was abandoned.

Sabine Pass, TX

During the Civil War, Confederate General John B. Magruder ordered this fort built on September 4, 1863—just four days before Dick Dowling's small company famously repelled a Union fleet at nearby Sabine Pass. When a September storm drove the Union coaling ship Mannahassett ashore, Confederates seized its cargo and even borrowed its name for the new fort. Designed by former Austrian officer Valery Sulakowski and engineered by Swiss-born Getulius Kellersberger, the five-redoubt fort guarded the Texas coast with ten cannons.

Mason, TX

When Texas seceded, Fort Mason and the newly established Camp Llano became links in a Confederate line of frontier posts, spaced a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Occupied first by the First Regiment Texas Mounted Rifles and then the Frontier Regiment, these troops guarded scattered settlers against raids while the war raged elsewhere. Locals took shelter at Fort Mason, and even a lone mail carrier crept between the posts by night, dodging raiders to keep the mail moving.

Cross Plains, TX

Between 1851 and 1861, the U.S. 2nd Cavalry and its supply trains moved along this route linking Fort Mason to Camp Cooper during the army's antebellum campaigns against the Plains Indians. Among the officers who traveled the road were men soon to become giants of the Civil War, including Robert E. Lee and George H. Thomas, the future 'Rock of Chickamauga.'

Mason, TX

The U.S. Army established Fort Mason on July 6, 1851, to shield the Texas frontier, naming it for Lt. George T. Mason, who had been killed near Brownsville in the war with Mexico. Between 1856 and 1861 it hosted officers of the famed 2nd U.S. Cavalry — Albert Sidney Johnston, George H. Thomas, Earl Van Dorn, and Robert E. Lee — many of whom would win fame or infamy in the coming Civil War. Federal troops abandoned the post in March 1861 and returned only after the war, garrisoning it until 1869.

Laredo, TX

In March 1849, only months after the U.S.-Mexico War redrew the border along the Rio Grande, soldiers of the 1st U.S. Infantry threw up a star-shaped earthen fort on a bluff above the river and named it Camp Crawford, soon renamed Fort McIntosh. It anchored the young United States' newly won southern frontier, guarding river crossings and escorting travelers through contested borderlands. For decades the post housed troops through Indian campaigns, the Civil War era, and ongoing border unrest.

Laredo, TX

By 1880 Fort McIntosh had grown from earthworks into a permanent brick garrison, and this surviving barracks — one of three built that year — quartered soldiers assigned to scouting and escort duty along the Rio Grande. Its four large rooms flanking a central stairway housed the enlisted men who patrolled a still-turbulent border in the decades after the Civil War. The building is the last of its trio to endure.

Roosevelt, TX

Laid out in 1852 and reopened when the frontier forts were reactivated after the Civil War, this road ran north and south between Forts Terrett, Clark, and McKavett, its route chosen chiefly for the water along the way. It carried mail, freight, troops, and a trickle of settlers, and served as a line of march for Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's campaigns against Native peoples to the northwest. After the forts closed in 1883, ranchers used stretches of it to drive cattle to market.

Menard, TX

Twenty-one miles west of this marker stood Fort McKavett, occupied by Confederate cavalry after secession to guard the frontier against Indian raids, and in early 1862 used to confine Union troops trying to leave Texas. Permanent forces withdrew that April when the defense line pulled back eastward, but scouting parties of Confederate and state troops kept using the post—often supplying their own horses, guns, and food—to shield settlements. It formed one link in a chain of posts set a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, honored here by a 1963 state memorial.

Marlin, TX

In the anxious first years of Texas independence, this spot served as the capital of Robertson's Colony, briefly called Sarahville de Viesca before it was renamed Milam late in 1835. As Anglo settlers pushed into the Brazos country, a ranging company threw up a fort here to guard families against raids. It stood as one of the frontier outposts that marked the contested boundary between newcomers and the Native peoples whose lands they were entering.

Cooks Point, TX

Fort Oldham was raised in 1836–37 by pioneers who sheltered with William Oldham, an infantry major in the Texas War for Independence. In seasons of Native raids dozens lived within its walls, and by 1838 it had a post office and stood on the Independence–Tenoxtitlan Road; Oldham himself later rode with the Somervell and Mier Expeditions, was captured by Mexican forces, and escaped to make his way home.

Groesbeck, TX

Built in 1834 by the Parker family — leaders of the first Predestinarian Baptist body to reach Texas — this private stockade sheltered several allied families on the Central Texas frontier. On May 18, 1836, a Comanche raid killed several of the men and carried off captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. She grew up among the Comanche, married Chief Peta Nocona, and bore Quanah Parker, who would become the last chief of the Comanche.

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.

Hawley, TX

Fort Phantom Hill was established in 1851 as one of a chain of frontier posts, but its garrison abandoned it after barely two and a half years. The ruins found second lives—as a stop on the Southern Overland Mail before the Civil War and as a sub-post of Fort Griffin in the early 1870s—while a lively village grew up nearby, even serving briefly as Jones County's seat in 1881 before fading away.

Anson, TX

When Texas seceded, Confederate and state troops took over abandoned Fort Phantom Hill as an outpost guarding the frontier against Indian raids while the state's men were away at war. In 1862 the defense line was pulled back thirty miles east, but patrols kept ranging out—often on their own horses, guns, and provisions—to protect settlements and watch for Union incursion. The marker honors Texans who held a 2,000-mile line of coast and frontier with the few men the Confederacy could spare.

Sierra Blanca, TX

Sixteen miles southwest along the Rio Grande, on the old military and stage road from San Antonio to El Paso, Fort Quitman anchored the Confederate far western frontier after U.S. posts were surrendered in 1861. Occupied by Texas mounted rifles, it sat on the supply and communication line for the 1861–62 Confederate campaign to reach the Pacific through Arizona and New Mexico, and was briefly held by Union troops from California in 1862. From here, thinly manned camps a day's ride apart guarded a 2,000-mile frontier for the western Confederacy.

Jacksboro, TX

Established by the U.S. War Department in November 1867, Fort Richardson stood as the northernmost of a chain of posts guarding the Texas frontier against raids in the years after the Civil War. It was named for General Israel B. Richardson, mortally wounded at Antietam in 1862. As settlement pushed westward the fort's purpose faded, and it was abandoned in 1878; what stands here was partially reconstructed in 1936.

Jacksboro, TX

Built by the U.S. Army in 1867, Fort Richardson anchored the northernmost line of federal posts guarding Texas settlers during the Indian Wars that followed the Civil War. The site had already known travelers as a stop on the Butterfield Overland stage route in the years before secession. Garrisoned troops rode from here on patrols across a contested frontier until the post was abandoned in 1879 as the fighting moved west.

Jacksboro, TX

Part of Fort Richardson, built in 1867 to shield North Texas settlers, this post hospital witnessed a pivotal moment in frontier justice. In May 1871 General William Tecumseh Sherman was inspecting the fort when word came of the Warren Wagon Train massacre 24 miles away. The accused, tracked to Fort Sill, were brought to Jacksboro for trial — the first time Native men were tried in a white civilian court in North Texas.

Jacksboro, TX

Built in 1899 by H. J. Hensley and L. A. Wilson on the site of the earlier Wichita House, the Fort Richardson Hotel served the frontier town of Jacksboro near the U.S. Army post whose name it borrowed. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967 and preserved by a Hensley descendant.

Rio Grande City, TX

Established in 1848 at Davis Landing on the Rio Grande, this post was named for Major David Ringgold, mortally wounded at the Battle of Palo Alto in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. Its garrison came and went through the mid-19th century—abandoned in 1861, reoccupied after the Civil War—and a young Robert E. Lee passed through in 1856 and 1860 while stationed in Texas. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Rio Grande City, TX

Early in the Civil War, Confederate Texans under Col. John S. Ford occupied Fort Ringgold on the Rio Grande, a vital link in the chain of posts guarding Texas's vast frontier, coastline, and border. From here commanders like Ford, August Buchel, and Santos Benavides scouted the river, defended ranches, and protected the cotton wagons trading through neutral Mexico for war supplies. Union cavalry seized the fort in late 1863, but Ford retook it in May 1864 and used it as a springboard to recapture Brownsville.

Sabine Pass, TX

When war came in 1861, the citizens of Sabine City formed a Committee of Safety and, with enslaved and free labor, raised a dirt-and-timber earthwork to guard the strategic Sabine Pass channel into East Texas and western Louisiana. In September 1862 a Union steamer and two schooners battered the fort; with only about sixty defenders and yellow fever spreading, Confederate Major Josephus S. Irvine spiked the guns and abandoned it. Lessons from its fall shaped nearby Fort Griffin, site of the famous 1863 Confederate victory at Sabine Pass.

Vega, TX

First blazed in 1840 by trader Josiah Gregg seeking a southern route to Santa Fe along the Canadian River, this path was followed in 1849 by Captain Randolph Marcy, who guided some 500 California-bound emigrants west from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Cresting onto the Llano Estacado near here, Marcy found the plains "as boundless and trackless as the ocean," yet praised the ground as ideal for wagons and championed the route for a future transcontinental railroad. In time the automobile age laid U.S. Highway 66 and Interstate 40 close along the same corridor.

Borger, TX

In 1840 the trader and author Josiah Gregg blazed a shorter path between Arkansas and New Mexico, crossing this stretch of the Texas Panhandle as he returned from Santa Fe and Chihuahua. His popular 1844 account recommended the route, and within a decade thousands of California gold seekers followed it westward, some escorted by U.S. Army officers surveying it for a wagon road and even a railroad. By the late 1850s traffic shifted to a southern road, and the trail fell silent, its wagon ruts still faintly visible in the prairie sod.

Amarillo, TX

Faint traces of an old overland road still cross the land southwest of this marker—the route that linked the Arkansas river ports of Fort Smith and Van Buren with Santa Fe, a trade center since 1609. It was pioneered by Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg, who first passed this spot in March 1840. A decade later, gold seekers bound for California poured along the same road, which in the days before barbed wire carried soldiers, hunters, and traders across the open plains.

Inez, TX

In 1685 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, planted the first European settlement in Texas near here, only to have it collapse under hardship and attacks by the Karankawa people; a Spanish expedition under Alonso de León burned its ruins in 1689. On the same ground the Spanish later raised Presidio La Bahía to guard Mission Espíritu Santo, part of a mission-presidio system that moved twice more before settling at Goliad in 1749. The site witnessed the collision of French ambition, Spanish empire, and Native power on the Gulf coast.

Fort Stockton, TX

Fort Stockton guarded the West Texas frontier from its founding in 1859, was abandoned during the Civil War, and was reestablished in 1867, when this locally quarried stone guard house went up. Its lumber hauled by oxcart from distant Indianola, the building held a guardroom, arm and leg irons, and a dungeon for solitary confinement before the fort was abandoned in 1886.

Ft. Stockton, TX

When the U.S. Army rebuilt Fort Stockton in 1867 to guard the road to El Paso, it raised seven adobe-and-stone houses for officers' families facing the parade ground. Complete with corrals and carriage stalls, these quarters served until the fort closed in 1886. Three of the residences still stand today.

Ft. Stockton, TX

After Federal troops abandoned it at the start of the Civil War, Fort Stockton was occupied by the 2nd Regiment Texas Mounted Rifles as part of the Confederacy's far-western defense line and its bid to reach the Pacific through the Arizona–New Mexico campaign of 1861–62. Comanche and Apache activity centered on the area, and California Union troops came to dominate the region from 1862 to 1865. The post also drew Union sympathizers and others hoping to escape the war.

Caldwell, TX

In July 1830 the Mexican government established Fort Tenoxtitlan near here, naming it for the Aztec capital in a bid to halt the flood of Anglo-American settlers pouring into Texas. The plan failed: troops abandoned the post by 1832, and a town nevertheless sprang up after 1834 that drew many prominent early Texans. Like many frontier settlements, it faded from the map, gone by 1860.

Caldwell, TX

Founded by Mexico in 1830 as a bulwark against Anglo-American immigration, Fort Tenoxtitlan took the ancient Aztec name for Mexico City, meaning "prickly pear place," and its commandant even dreamed of it becoming Texas's capital. The plan backfired as Mexican soldiers and Anglo pioneers became friends and the empresario Sterling C. Robertson funneled in settlers. After troops withdrew in 1832 the site passed to the Anglos, and among its residents were five signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, an Alamo martyr, and seven veterans of San Jacinto before it was abandoned amid Indian raids in 1841.

Chester, TX

In 1830 the Mexican government planted Fort Terán on the Neches to halt the tide of Anglo-American colonists pouring into Texas—the first white settlement in what became Tyler County. Named for General Manuel Mier y Terán, commander of Mexican forces in Texas, it was led in 1831 by the colorful Peter Ellis Bean. The garrison's mission reflected Mexico City's growing alarm at Anglo immigration, but the effort proved futile, and troops abandoned the post in 1835 on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Only the marked site remains.

Port Bolivar, TX

Just after Texas declared independence in 1836, President David Burnet sent Colonel Ed Harcourt to Galveston Island to throw up a fortification, and using army recruits and enslaved labor Harcourt built an octagonal earth-and-timber fort armed with guns taken from the Texas Navy schooner Cayuga. Named for Alamo defender William B. Travis, the original fort was soon storm-damaged, but the name endured: a second Fort Travis rose at Bolivar Point in 1898-99 near a former Civil War Confederate work. Its coastal batteries were expanded through both World Wars before the fort was decommissioned and sold as surplus in 1949, later sheltering residents from hurricanes.

Savoy, TX

Built in 1836 by Arkansas Indian trader Abel Warren to guard his trading post, Fort Warren was among the earliest settlements in Fannin County, its bois d'arc walls anchored by two-story corner guardhouses. Kiowa, Tonkawa, Caddo, Wichita, and other peoples came to exchange furs for knives, paint, and trade goods, and during the Civil War the post served as a supply center funneling provisions to Confederate troops and Indian refugees in the Territory to the north.

Gonzales, TX

Named for Confederate General Thomas N. Waul, this earthen fort was begun in late 1863 to guard inland Texas against a possible Federal push up the Guadalupe River and to protect military supply trains. Engineer Col. Albert Miller Lea oversaw its construction, partly by enslaved laborers, on a scale of roughly 250 by 750 feet. Surviving records leave it uncertain whether the fortification was ever finished.

Mineral Wells, TX

Growing from the 1925 National Guard grounds of "Old" Camp Wolters, this post was activated by the U.S. Army in 1940 as an infantry replacement center, expanding to more than 7,500 acres with over 100 buildings raised in under four months. It trained tens of thousands of soldiers—including Medal of Honor recipients Jack Knight and Audie Murphy—and held German POWs during World War II. Reactivated after the war, it became the Army's primary helicopter flight-training center during the Vietnam era before closing in 1973.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth began in 1849 as a U.S. Army dragoon post named by Major Ripley Arnold for his old commander, General William Jenkins Worth, guarding the edge of Anglo settlement. After the fort's brief military life, the town it spawned boomed once millions of longhorns began fording the Trinity here on their way up the Chisholm Trail, earning the nickname "Cowtown." The railroad's 1876 arrival turned it into one of the world's great cattle markets, and later meatpacking, oil, and aircraft plants carried its growth into the modern era.

Amarillo, TX

The Fort Worth and Denver City Railway pushed across the Texas Panhandle in the late 1880s, and its arrival was the making of Amarillo — turning a cluster of buildings on the open plains into a shipping hub for cattle and, later, wheat. The depot marked here was the town's front door, where passengers, mail, and freight moved between the isolated Panhandle and the wider nation. Rail depots like it were the beating heart of frontier-era Texas towns.

Amarillo, TX

Chartered by Fort Worth citizens in 1873 but delayed by that year's financial panic, the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway became the first railroad to cross the Texas Panhandle. Grading began in 1881 under famed engineer G. M. Dodge, and as crews pushed the rails northwest, their camps became towns—Amarillo among them, born in 1887. The line's completion in 1888 opened a through route to Denver and helped transform the old buffalo range into an economy of cattle, grain, and petroleum.

Westworth Village, TX

In 1941, Fort Worth boosters led by Amon G. Carter secured an aircraft plant to build B-24 Liberator bombers, and the Army opened an adjoining airfield that in 1943 became Fort Worth Army Air Field, training more than 4,000 pilots during World War II. Renamed Carswell Air Force Base in 1948 for hometown Medal of Honor pilot Horace S. Carswell, Jr., it became a front-line Strategic Air Command base of the Cold War—home first to the giant B-36 Peacemaker and then the B-52, whose crews flew the Vietnam War's Operation Linebacker II in 1972. After the base closed in 1993 it reopened as a Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base.

Fort Worth, TX

When the railroad reached Fort Worth in 1876, it transformed the town from a regional trading post into a national livestock hub. The stockyards' Belt Railway, launched in 1904, shuttled cattle and supplies into the yards and finished products out to markets across the country. As trucking rose in the 1920s the belt declined, and today a short surviving stretch carries an excursion train through the historic stockyards district.