FORT LEATON Fort — Presidio, Texas Status: Historic site · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/fort-leaton-presidio-texas/ The 1848 adobe trading fort on the Rio Grande—Ben Leaton’s empire. A fort in Presidio, Texas, Fort Leaton is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The 1848 adobe trading fort on the Rio Grande—Ben Leaton’s empire. HauntHunt files it with military history, local folklore and haunted places. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors. Fort Leaton is the private fort on the border — the largest adobe structure in Texas, built on the Rio Grande at La Junta de los Rios where the Chihuahua Trail crossed into Mexico. Ben Leaton bought the compound from Juan Bustillos in 1848, the year the border moved, and turned it into home, trading post, and citadel — the first Anglo farm in Presidio County and the county's first seat before there was a county. The trade was the borderlands' whole economy — Leaton sold dried beef, cornmeal, stock, and peach brandy to travelers making the two-month haul from San Antonio, and quietly swapped guns and ammunition to the Apaches and Comanches for goods stolen off Mexican ranches — the deal that made him rich and both governments angry. When he died in 1851, his widow Juana Pedrasa married the teamster Edward Hall; Hall gambled the place into default, refused to leave, and the lender's son murdered him in the dining room. The Burgess family ran the fort until 1884. The site keeps its layers — La Junta's been occupied since 1500 BCE, the fort's adobe holds the trading room where Leaton dealt and the dining room where Hall was killed, and the state restored it all in the 1970s. The file keeps the border fort's real history: not a military post but a private one, the merchant's castle on the river where the border was a business. Fort Leaton is the archive's private-fort file — the 1848 adobe trading post on the Rio Grande where Leaton armed the tribes and the lender's son killed his successor, the largest adobe in Texas still standing at La Junta. WHY THIS FILE MATTERS Fort Leaton is the archive's border file — the trading post that worked both sides of a border that had just moved, the murder in the dining room, and the adobe walls the state preserved. A fort built for trade keeps its walls — the file's suggestion being that Leaton's hold is the compound itself: the trading room, the parapet, and the river crossing where the borderland's business was done. FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified · [Local folklore] apparition: Reported a presence in the adobe rooms. The fort's documented violence is the soil the reports grow in — Presidio, Texas keeps both on file. It circulates as local folklore — the kind communities keep rather than verify. The report is preserved in sources like 'Fort Leaton'. The apparition is the file's anchor — every other report orbits it. source: Fort Leaton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Leaton) HISTORY — 1 documented facts · [1848] Built 1848; Leaton’s trading post dominated the border. A fort with documented casualties writes its own foundation — the lore comes after. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. 'Fort Leaton' documents the entry. The date is part of the site's documented spine. The file stays open on it. SOURCES — 1 cited · Fort Leaton — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Leaton — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/