Officers' Row, 1874-1875

The six quarters on this row are identical, and none of them looks like adobe. The 1874 brick walls are covered with wood siding, and the gable ends carry decorative fishscale shingles. The Game and Parks Commission uses them as tourist lodging, so the post's oldest buildings are the ones visitors sleep in. Nearby, the adjutant's office and the guardhouse of the same years are reconstructions, rebuilt by the State Historical Society on their original sites from archaeological and documentary evidence and used as exhibit space. Many later structures were torn down by the USDA in the 1950s.

What the plaque says

Officers' Row, 1874-1875 These officers' quarters with adobe brick walls are the oldest original buildings at Fort Robinson. The post surgeon noted they had dirt floors and complained over delays in shipping heating stoves. A frame lean-to at the rear provided kitchen and servant quarters. In the early 1880s, partitions through the common hallways were built to prevent arguments between occupants of the double sets of quarters. Crazy Horse passed between two of these quarters September 5, 1877, enroute to the guardhouse. Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Robinson State Park — steps away
  The army post beside the Red Cloud Agency where Crazy Horse was bayoneted in 1877 and Morning Star's Northern Cheyenne broke out into the January cold of 1879.
• Toadstool Geologic Park — 14 mi
  A pocket of badlands in the Oglala National Grassland where sandstone caps balance on clay stems, ancient tracks cross the rock, and a trail leads on to a 10,000-year-old bison bone bed.
• Agate Fossil Beds National Monument — 21 mi
  A fossil quarry on the Niobrara that also keeps the gifts Red Cloud and other Lakota and Cheyenne visitors gave the ranching family who were their friends for thirty-five years.

More markers nearby

• Fort Robinson — steps away
• 1909 Brick Barracks — steps away
• Post Headquarters, 1905 — steps away
• Flagstaff, 1890 — steps away