Fort Bragg

The bronze explains the name and leaves out the post's job. Gibson's detachment came in 1857 to hold the Pomo and other peoples confined on the new Mendocino Indian Reservation; the reservation closed in 1866, settlers took up its land, and a mill town grew there around the Union Lumber Company, co-sponsor of this plaque. Bragg went on to command Confederate armies and enslaved more than a hundred people. State legislators asked the city to rename itself in 2015, and a citizens' committee formed in 2020 reached no consensus. The town still carries his name.

What the plaque says

Fort Bragg Established in this vicinity June 11, 1857, by 1st Lieut. Horatio Gates Gibson, 3d Artillery, later Brig. Gen. U. S. Army. Named by Gibson in honor of his former company commander, Braxton Bragg, later Gen. C. S. A. Abandoned in October, 1864. Registered Historical Landmark No. 615 Plaque placed by California State Park Commission in cooperation with the citizens of Fort Bragg and the Union Lumber Company, September 2, 1957.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Skunk Train (California Western Railroad) — steps away
  A logging railroad from 1885, named for the smell of the motorcars it put on in 1925.
• Glass Beach — 0.7 mi
  Sixty years of Fort Bragg's garbage, ground down by the surf into a beach its visitors have nearly picked clean.
• Jug Handle Ecological Staircase — 4.8 mi
  Five steps up from the beach, each about a hundred thousand years older than the last, ending in a forest of century-old trees no taller than a person.
• Point Cabrillo Light Station — 6.7 mi
  A 1909 light on the headland where a China trader's wreck set off the Mendocino lumber boom.

More markers nearby

• Mendocino Presbyterian Church — 9.6 mi
• Temple of Kwan Tai — 9.6 mi