Historic town has long served as an oasis
BRACKETTVILLE — “You want with mermaids or without?” the woman in the red baseball cap asked with a grin, noticing that I was aiming my camera in her direction.
She and her three friends, all women of a certain age, were waist deep on a sunny morning earlier this week in one of the prettiest — and third-largest — spring-fed swimming pools in all of Texas. I said, “Mermaids, of course!” even though it was the azure-blue water I was trying to shoot.
Las Moras Spring, just across U.S. Highway 90 from this historic, little town in sparsely populated Kinney County, has been attracting living creatures for eons. The Spanish conquistadors named it after the mulberry trees along the creek that flows into the Rio Grande. The heavily wooded area around the cool gushing spring has been a gathering place for perhaps 12,000 years.
It was a frontier fort — Fort Clark — for nearly a century, a Brown & Root-owned dude ranch for nearly three decades and, since 1971, a privately owned “leisure living community” called Fort Clark Spring, with some 800 residents. It’s still drawing people: retirees, Winter Texans, deer hunters, birders, history buffs — among them Roberto Calderone, a University of North Texas history professor who was taking a couple of days before the fall semester opens to get in a little bird-watching. Decked out in a floppy hat and hiking boots and carrying a sophisticated camera on his first morning on the trail, he told me
he already had spotted a summer tanager, a great kiskadee, a blue-headed vireo and “a tiny, little butterfly I’ve never seen before.”
Iowa native Sandee Hagen, treasurer of the Fort Clark Springs Association, the homeowners group, lived for 32 years in Boise, Idaho, and was one of five Boise residents who visited Fort Clark in 2010.
“We fell in love with the people, the turkeys, the deer running all over the place, the golf, the fishing,” she told me as she waited for a Monday morning conference call in the association offices, a two-story rock building that used to be a cavalry barracks.
Spawn of gold rush
More than 80 Fort Clark buildings are still intact; the sturdy stone structures constitute the largest National Register Historic District in private ownership west of the Mississippi. Like the association offices, many of the buildings have been repurposed: a superb little military museum in what used to be the guardhouse, tiny barred cells preserved; a hotel in another of the cavalry barracks; a soon-to-open bar and restaurant in the old officers’ club; a community theater in the fort’s old movie house.
Beautiful, old limestone houses along Officer’s Line are now private residences. Across the Spanish oak and pecan tree-shaded street is a three-par golf course. Homeowners also have access to an 18-hole course.
The boat-shaped pool where the West Texas mermaids frolicked was constructed for the military by the Works Progress Administration in 1939. A hundred feet wide and 300 feet long, it holds a million gallons of spring water flowing through daily at a constant 68 degrees.
Fort Clark owes its existence to California — the California Gold Rush, that is. The end of the Mexican War in 1848 opened up the Lower Road from San Antonio to El Paso and then on to the gold fields. Las Moras Spring, adjacent to the road, was a welcome oasis in the midst of endless miles of sage brush and prickly chaparral, gully-gashed plains and stony ground.
For centuries, the spring and the twisting tree-lined creek also had been a welcome resting place for Comanche warriors traversing the eastern branch of their war trail from Colorado into northern Mexico. After the Comanches’ defeat at the Battle of Las Moras Spring in 1840, the U.S. government acquired land from Samuel Maverick of San Antonio, and in 1852 established Fort Clark on high ground south of the road.
To supply the fort and serve travelers, Oscar Brackett founded a town on the low ground north of the road. A soldier’s memoir in the early 1900s described the settlement as “full of rum holes and gambling dens and crude women,” according to William F. Haenn in “Fort Clark and Brackettville: Land of Heroes.”
Only a handful saved
Earlier, Fort Clark was training ground for some of the best-known warriors of the Civil War and beyond. J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, John Bell Hood, William R. “Pecos Bill” Shafter and Abner Doubleday did Fort Clark duty in the 19th century, Gens. Jonathan Wainwright and George S. Patton Jr. in the 20th.
Among the most celebrated Fort Clark soldiers were the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts, who had come up from Mexico after slavery was abolished. The black Seminoles were considered superb trackers — “To find an Indian, send one,” was their motto — and their ranks included four Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. The unit was disbanded in 1914.
The fort itself was abandoned on Aug. 28, 1944. Two years later, the Texas Railway Equipment Co., a subsidiary of Brown & Root, paid the government $411,250 for salvage rights, a deal arranged by then-Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson.
Almost 1,500 structures were demolished before Annabelle Dahlstrom, wife of the owner of the Texas Railway Equipment Co., persuaded Herman Brown to save the historic buildings that remained. Brown opened the Fort Clark Guest Ranch in the early 1950s. A California real estate developer bought the 2,700-acre property in 1971.
The executive officer, Richard Lawrence, 61, is new to the job. He and his wife moved here four months ago to be near their grandchildren. White-haired with a neatly trimmed white beard, Lawrence’s soft Southern drawl bespeaks his Louisiana roots.
Before moving to Fort Clark, the Lawrences lived for 35 years in Canton. Richard, a licensed social worker, served as Van Zandt County judge and two terms as mayor of the little northeast Texas town known for its hugely popular First Monday trade days.
“I’ll tell you a little secret,” he said as he took me on a golf-cart tour of the fort. “I plan to do the same thing here.”
I glanced over at Lawrence to see if he was kidding. Unlike Canton, Fort Clark and Brackettville are miles from anywhere. I also remembered my recent visit to First Monday, with traffic clogged for miles and thousands of flea market fans pouring into the little town. Here at the old fort, we had just paused for a flock of wild turkeys to saunter across the road; a deer was grazing peacefully in a shady yard nearby. Our voices and the cart’s whir were about the only sounds on a weekday morning.
‘Land of heroes’
Lawrence wasn’t kidding, although he acknowledged that negotiations with homeowners and their association would be delicate.
“Never happen,” says Bill Haenn, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, amateur military historian and Fort Clark resident. It’ll never happen, he said by phone from his second home in New Mexico, because the homeowners — “a sanctuary community for village idiots" — can never get together on anything. Lawrence had warned me that Haenn, author of a Fort Clark history, had a passel of bones to pick with his fellow residents, and, indeed, he seemed to be embittered about a lot of folks: the homeowners association, the county historical commission, the state historical commission.
On one thing, though, he would agree — with Lawrence, with the homeowners, with the history groups: Fort Clark is a hidden gem. This “land of heroes,” to borrow Haenn’s book subtitle, deserves care and attention and an abiding respect for its distinguished history.