Fort Warren

Abel Warren, born in Northborough, Massachusetts, in 1814, reached Fort Smith at twenty-one and heard that trade on the upper Red River paid. The Handbook of Texas says his Fannin County post of 1836 did poorly: the Plains peoples he hoped to deal with lived too far west to visit regularly, and the arrival of settlers made visits even less likely. He abandoned it in 1836 or 1837 and built another near Walnut Creek in what is now Love County, Oklahoma, which he ran about eleven years. The Texas settlement kept his name as the county's first seat.

What the plaque says

Fort Warren (site six miles north) First settlement and fort In Fannin County. Built in 1836 by Abel Warren, Indian trader from Arkansas, to protect his trading post. Constructed of bois d'arc wood, the structure had a two-story guardhouse at all four corners. Kiowa, Tonkawa, Caddo, Wichita and other Indians came here to trade furs for paint, knives and trinkets. In Civil War, Fort Warren was a transport and food supply center, where goods were sent to Confederate Indian refugees and troops in Indian Territory (to the north) and to soldiers in Louisiana and Arkansas. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 8.1 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 15 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Eisenhower State Park — 21 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 25 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• Savoy Methodist Church — 0.8 mi
• First Baptist Church of Bells — 3.5 mi
• Carson Cemetery — 4.2 mi
• Ector Methodist Church — 4.5 mi