The army came to Marfa on 29 January 1911, when two troops of the Third Cavalry made a camp they called Camp Albert. It became Camp Marfa, and on the first day of 1930 Fort D. A. Russell. Through the Mexican Revolution the post was headquarters of the army's Big Bend District, which strung some forty small outposts along three hundred miles of the Rio Grande. In Presidio County alone there were cavalry posts at Shafter, Presidio, Redford, Ruidosa and Candelaria, and Camp Holland at Viejo Pass, which held two barracks for four hundred men.
Raiding crossed the river and the retaliation was worse than the raiding. Raiders hit the Brite Ranch on Christmas Day 1917. On 28 January 1918 Texas Rangers of Company B and four local ranchmen, with cavalrymen of the Eighth present, took fifteen men and boys out of the village of Porvenir on the river and shot them, and the army burned the village in the days that followed. The Neville Ranch raid that March is read by historians as retaliation for Porvenir. Governor Hobby disbanded Company B on 4 June 1918, and the legislative hearings Jose Tomas Canales opened the following January produced no charges against anyone.
The river outposts closed between September 1919 and January 1922, and in 1920 the Big Bend District was replaced by the Marfa Command. The post outlasted them, with a gap: the First Cavalry left for Fort Knox on 2 January 1933 and the fort stood empty until artillery arrived in October 1935. Two chemical warfare battalions trained there during the Second World War and a compound for German prisoners went up in 1943. It was deactivated in May 1945, closed in October 1946 and sold into private hands in 1949.
Getting there
30.2961, -104.0297
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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