Visiting an abandoned fort

Since last Saturday week was my birthday and we had to go halfway to Llano anyhow to pick up M, L and I decided it would be a good day to go on a trip.  I’ve been wanting to go to Fort McKavett, an abandoned Army post originally established to fight the Indians in 1852 and abandoned once due to the Civil War, and again due to there not being any Indians left to fight, in 1883.  We used to drive through it on our trips to the Mexican border when I was a tween, and I wanted to see whether my memory of it was at all accurate (it wasn’t).  So we decided we’d do that and take in the Presidio San Sabá at Menard on the way.

Pickup started at 10:00 and we got M by 10:30, and started off for Llano.  When we got there, we stopped to look at the courthouse, which from the re-dedication marker got fixed up before the Texas Historical Commission started their preservation funding program.  Of course it was locked up for Saturday, so all we could do was to look at the hallway through the doors.  It looked as though the architect who did the restoration had a fondness for barrel vaults and corrugated iron, ’cos that’s what all the hallway ceilings were made of.  On the way out of town we stopped at Cooper’s BBQ for lunch, which I thought was overrated.  Much too much crust on the outside of the meat.  I’ll take Smitty’s in Lockhart, thanks.

After lunch we went on to Mason and Menard, and stopped at the presidio.  It’s in much worse shape than Goliad is.  The reconstruction that the state did in 1937 was badly done, and it all fell down again within a few years.  The ruins are maintained, if you can call it that, by the city and county of Menard. They left just enough of the perimeter wall to give you an idea of how big the plaza was, rebuilt one of the corner bastions and some of the adjoining chapel-area walls, and left the opposite bastion only about half-built with one of the walls open, so visitors can see how a rubblestone wall is made.  (Start with two parallel sections of masonry, and fill the core between with stone rubble, hence the name.)  The caretaker showed us a stone where Jim Bowie is supposed to have carved his name, and if you have some imagination you can see “Bouie” among all the other names scratched into the stone.

After that we continued on down US 190 until we got to the farm-road turnoff that goes to the fort.  It was a good twenty-mile drive from the turn, and we were certainly in the middle of noplace by the time we got there.  The one-pump ser sta gro that I remembered seemed to have closed down and gone away, but in compensation there was rather a lot of reconstructed fort to see.  The historical commission got hold of the place in ’78, after the time I remember it about 1970, and they’ve rebuilt about half the fort buildings—the hospital, which now serves as a visitors’ center, the schoolhouse, some of the married officers’ houses, some of the bachelor officers’ quarters, one barracks, and the bakery.  Other buildings—the commanding officer’s house, which burned down in 1940, some more of the barracks, some unidentified buildings—were left in their tumbledown state, so you can see what they had to work with when they started, which wasn t a lot.

The visitors’ center had a small exhibit about the fort and the units stationed there, which included the 9th and 10th Cavalry, and the 24th and 25th Infantry.  There were the usual assortment of things dug up in various archaeological excavations, nothing that you wouldn’t expect to find around a military installation.  That day they had the man who does historical interpretation as the post tailor there, and a friend of his, who were both working on uniforms for historical recreation, which they both do.  L sat down with them and dove right in to a discussion of historical costuming and clothing construction techniques, to which M and I abandoned her while we walked around and looked at the buildings.  M took a number of pictures, but I don’t know if any of them came out.  Her digital camera, which came to her from her cousins, isn’t much to talk about and I think I’m going to give her one of my two digital point-and-shoots, both of which are better than hers.

We finally looked at enough piles of rocks to satisfy M, so we went back to the schoolhouse and collected L and started home.  We cut across country and picked up I-10 a little west of Junction, then turned off on US 290 and came home through Fredericksburg, where we had dinner.  We still got home in the daylight, and I’d had enough driving to suit me for one day.