The United States Army built a post on Barons Creek in December 1848 and gave it up in December 1853, the frontier line having moved west past it. What happened to the buildings afterwards is the better half of the story. Johann Wolfgang Braeutigam had come over in 1845 as a boy of sixteen, with his parents and two sisters, and married Christine Kensing in 1850. In 1870 he moved the family into the abandoned fort and opened a beer garden in it, with a saloon and a dance hall. The Gillespie County fair was held on the grounds from 1881 to 1889, the parade ground dragged flat with logs for its racetrack. On 3 September 1884 he was murdered by four strangers robbing the cash box, an account resting on family and local history rather than any inquest record.
The family held the place until 1959, when the City of Fredericksburg bought it. Of twenty one original military buildings only the guardhouse survives, raised at the end of the 1840s. Braeutigam turned it into his home and clad it in wooden additions until nothing about it read as military, and the stone stayed hidden inside the woodwork until a young carpenter climbed into the attic in the 1980s and found it.
The garrison's own worst act was against the town. On the night of 1 July 1850 about fifty soldiers burned the store of the merchant John Hunter, who was also the county clerk, in reprisal for his stabbing a soldier to death the night before after refusing to sell him whiskey. The county's records were in the building and the soldiers stopped the townspeople from salvaging them, and Volume A of the deed record has been missing ever since, although the district clerk's books from 1849 survive.
Getting there
30.2494, -98.8461
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