Fort Mason-Camp Cooper Military Road

At its southern end this road served Fort Mason, sited in July 1851 on Post Oak Hill near Comanche and Centennial creeks. Companies of the Second United States Cavalry held the fort from January 1856 to March 1861. That January it had its largest garrison, the regimental headquarters and six companies, under Col. Albert Sidney Johnston. The Handbook of Texas counts twenty officers stationed there before the Civil War who later became generals, twelve for the Confederacy and eight for the Union, among them Earl Van Dorn, John Bell Hood and E. Kirby Smith.

What the plaque says

Route for U.S. 2nd Cavalry and supplies from San Antonio to Fort Mason (about 100 miles south of here) to Camp Cooper (about 65 miles north) in campaigns of 1851-1861 against Plains Indians. Great military men of American history traveled this road, including Robert E. Lee (later a commanding general, C.S.A.) and George T. Thomas, "Rock of Chickamauga." Callahan County Historical Survey Committee, 1967.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Brownwood State Park — 20 mi
  A CCC park on a reservoir that filled in a single flood before its dam was done, with stone cabins, a hilltop dance pavilion and a grand staircase climbed by dancers arriving by boat.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 22 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 28 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.

More markers nearby

• Home of Robert E. Howard — 0.2 mi
• Cross Plains Review — 0.7 mi
• Site of Cottonwood Springs — 6.1 mi
• Cottonwood Bank and Post Office — 6.1 mi