Military Architecture at Fort Clark: A Guide to the Texas Historic Landmark

Take a comprehensive tour of Fort Clark, Texas, one of best-preserved districts on the National Register of Historic Places. Thomas Jefferson recognized that a morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. The Fort Clark Historic District, in Kinney County, Texas, is far more than a morsel. It is a full-course buffet of U.S. Army architecture, with more than one hundred well-preserved structures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some built to Quartermaster model plans, and many the only remaining examples in the nation. While most other Texas Indian War–era forts are long abandoned and reduced to nothing more than stark chimneys on the prairie, Fort Clark’s wide-ranging military architecture has survived virtually unchanged. Author William Haenn surveys the landmark site that represents nearly a century of active service to Texas and the nation.

Bill Haenn retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel in 1993 and has since lived at Fort Clark, immersed in its history. He is the author of the bestselling book Fort Clark and Brackettville Land of Heroes, a photographic history for Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series. The Texas Historical Commission honored Bill in 2011 with its prestigious Award of Merit in recognition of his prodigious historical documentation, continued leadership, preservation and heritage tourism promotion of the natural and built environment of Historic Fort Clark, Brackettville, Texas.