Fort Concho

Fort Concho was the fort that built San Angelo — the 1867 post at the junction of the Concho rivers where the Army put forty limestone buildings on a 'flat, treeless, dreary prairie' and ended up, one officer wrote, with 'the most beautiful and best ordered post on the Texas border.' For twenty-two years it was the frontier's headquarters — 400 to 500 men patrolling, mapping, escorting the stagecoaches and cattle drives and railroad surveyors through Comanche country.

The garrison was the Buffalo Soldiers — the Tenth Cavalry headquartered here 1875 to 1882 under Colonel Benjamin Grierson, with the Ninth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry rotating through; over the fort's life, Black troopers were exactly half its strength. Lieutenant Henry Flipper, the first Black West Point graduate, served at Concho in 1880 before the Army sent him to Fort Davis and the court-martial that followed. Grierson, Mackenzie, 'Pecos Bill' Shafter — the frontier's officer corps passed through the parade ground.

The Army left in June 1889 and the town grew through the fort — residences and warehouses and a school inside the old post's bounds. San Angelo started buying it back in 1929 and has been restoring it ever since: twenty-four original and reconstructed buildings now, a National Historic Landmark where the barracks and officers' row still face the parade ground the Tenth Cavalry drilled. The file keeps the fort's honesty: a post built to push Native peoples off their land, staffed half by the soldiers the country had only just allowed to serve.

Fort Concho is the archive's frontier-headquarters file — the 1867 post where the Buffalo Soldiers' Tenth Cavalry headquartered, Flipper served, and the best-preserved frontier fort in Texas stands inside the city it created.