Charles A. Lindbergh in Texas

Camp Wood was only four years old when Lindbergh came down there. Workers of the Uvalde Cedar Company founded the town in 1920 to cut the area's cedar, and that year it became the northern end of the Uvalde and Northern Railroad and the townsite was laid out. The first cedar workers lived in tents, but the town grew quickly through the 1920s and held at 700 to 800 people until World War II. In 1976 Camp Wood named a park for Lindbergh and a street for his partner, L. A. Klink.

What the plaque says

Charles A. Lindbergh in Texas Texas was important in the career of aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-75). When he bought his first World War I surplus Jenny in Georgia, he flew it to Texarkana in 1923, so he could say he had flown in Texas -- the ambition of every barnstormer. With L. A. Klink in March 1924, he landed Klink's Canuck in Camp Wood while trying to fly to California. The next day in attempting a take-off, he accidentally crashed into Warren Puett's Store. No one was hurt, and his offer to pay for the damage was rejected. Then called "Slim," Lindbergh made many friends here. Two weeks after visiting Camp Wood, he became a U.S. Air Service cadet at Brooks Field, San Antonio. He completed advanced flight training at Kelly Field in 1925. On May 20-21, 1927, he made the first solo flight from New York to Paris, to world acclaim. Later in 1927, he returned to Texas, surveying the first commercial transcontinental air route through Amarillo; in 1929, he inaugurated U.S.-Mexico airmail in Brownsville. A great aviation pioneer, he drew up and proved many major world air routes. He flew in combat in World War II; collaborated in medical research; helped organize the Berlin airlift; and remained a hero to people of Camp Wood and Texas. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Real County Historical Museum — 16 mi
  A small county museum in Leakey, at the head of the Frio Canyon, with a log-cabin parlor, an 1880s horse-drawn hearse, a wool and mohair shearing machine and 1910s jail cells.
• Garner State Park — 17 mi
  The Frio River park that Uvalde County built with the Civilian Conservation Corps and named for its own vice president, where people have danced on the stone pavilion every summer since the 1940s.
• Devil's Sinkhole State Natural Area — 27 mi
  A 140-foot shaft into a cavern outside Rocksprings, seen only on guided tours from a platform at the rim as some three million bats spiral out on summer evenings.
• Kickapoo Cavern State Park — 27 mi
  A lightly developed former ranch on the Kinney-Edwards line with twenty caves, a Saturday tour into a 1,400-foot cavern and a summer bat flight from Stuart Bat Cave.

More markers nearby

• Private Frank Marshall, C.S.A. — 0.3 mi
• Site of Camp Wood — 0.4 mi
• Site of the Mission San Lorenzo de La Santa Cruz — 0.4 mi
• Dixie Settlement — 3.9 mi