Fort Phantom Hill

The post was badly placed. Gen. Belknap's orders had called for a fort on Pecan Bayou, but Gen. Persifor F. Smith moved the site to the Clear Fork near Elm Creek, where water and timber were scarce. Elm Creek often ran dry and the Clear Fork was brackish, so even an eighty-foot walk-in well near the guardhouse was not enough, and water came by wagon from a spring four miles upriver. Blackjack logs were hauled as far as forty miles. The army never named it; records call it the Post on the Clear Fork of the Brazos.

What the plaque says

Established November 14, 1851 Abandoned April 6, 1854 Repaired and used by Southern Overland Mail, 1858-1861 Sub-post of Fort Griffin in 1871 and 1872 A thriving village which grew up in its vicinity after the Civil War served as temporary county seat of Jones County in 1881 but declined rapidly after county seat was located at Anson

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Phantom Hill — steps away
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Frontier Texas! — 14 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Old Jail Art Center — 23 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 26 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.

More markers nearby

• Bud Matthews Switch of the Texas Central Railway — 11 mi
• Big Country Baptist Assembly — 12 mi
• Site of Old Headquarters of the Hashknife Ranch — 12 mi
• Hardin-Simmons University — 12 mi