Fort McIntosh

Black soldiers served at Fort McIntosh through the 1870s without notable incident. Their return after the Spanish-American War brought the post's sharpest racial conflict. In October 1899 an undetermined number of men from Company D, 25th Infantry, complaining of police brutality, beat and clubbed a peace officer. Governor Joseph Sayers answered the public outcry by demanding the removal of all Black troops from the state. The furor eased once several infantrymen were arrested and townspeople feared Washington might close the post. The Handbook of Texas says it foreshadowed the later outbursts at Brownsville and Houston.

What the plaque says

Fort McIntosh Established March 3, 1849, by troops of the 1st U.S. infantry from ringgold barracks under command of Lt. E. L. Viele. The star-shaped earthen fortress built on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande (1/2 mile northwest), was first called Camp Crawford, in honor of Secretary of War George W. Crawford. On January 7, 1850, the name was changed to Fort McIntosh for Lt. Col. James S. McIntosh, who died Sept. 26, 1847, of wounds received two weeks earlier in the Mexican War Battle of Molino Del Rey. During the 1850s, Fort McIntosh served as a vital link in the defense system along the Rio Grande frontier. The post was abandoned in March 1859, reoccupied in January 1860, and abandoned again in April 1861, when the U.S. Army left Texas after secession. Soon after the Civil War, Fort McIntosh was reoccupied and moved to this location in 1869. Until the mid-1880s, soldiers were involved in escort duty and scouting for raiding Indians and bandits on both sides of the Rio Grande. After the turn of the century, the Fort McIntosh garrison was deployed along the border to prevent incursions by Mexican revolutionaries, and the post served as a training camp for soldiers who fought in both world wars. Fort McIntosh was discontinued as an army post on June 9, 1947, after 98 years of service. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — steps away
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.
• San Agustín Plaza — 0.9 mi
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — 0.9 mi
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• San Agustín Cathedral — 0.9 mi
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.

More markers nearby

• El Paso de Jacinto — 0.2 mi
• Pvt. David Bennes Cantu Barkley — 0.3 mi
• Jovita Idar — 0.4 mi
• El Primer Congreso Mexicanista — 0.5 mi