Gainesville-Fort Sill Road

The road exists partly because other soldiers failed to build it. The Handbook of Texas says Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper constructed the Gainesville to Fort Sill road after a troop of the Fourth Cavalry got drunk and deserted the officer assigned to do the job. Flipper had been born into slavery in Georgia, and in 1877 became the first Black graduate of West Point. At Fort Davis he was court-martialed in 1881, acquitted of embezzlement but found guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer, and dismissed in 1882. He maintained his innocence for the rest of his life.

What the plaque says

Gainesville-Fort Sill Road The U.S. Cavalry constructed roads to improve logistical routes in the west during the 19th century. Henry O. Flipper, the first African American graduate of West Point, was an officer in the Tenth Cavalry regiment "Buffalo Soldiers" at Fort Sill, Indian Territory (Oklahoma). By late 1879, Fort Sill required a more significant railroad town than nearby Caddo Station, and the Army placed Flipper in command of building a road from Fort Sill to Gainesville. Two years later, the railroad reached Henrietta and replaced Gainesville as a Fort Sill supply town. Nevertheless, the construction of the Gainesville-Fort Sill Road is a historic example of the Buffalo Soldiers' contributions to the west's economic development. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Great Hanging Memorial — steps away
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.
• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 22 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 24 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

• The Great Hanging at Gainesville, 1862 — steps away
• Cooke County Free Library — 0.2 mi
• Gainesville National Bank — 0.2 mi
• Barbed Wire in Cooke County — 0.2 mi