Site of Camp Verde

Albert Sidney Johnston started from the post in 1857 on his expedition against the Mormons in Utah, and by 1949 only a few ruins of the camel corrals and officers' quarters remained. A community grew around a store opened beside the camp in 1857, reportedly to sell soldiers the liquor barred inside it. Its post office ran from 1858 to 1866 and again from 1887 to 1892, and Walter S. Nowlin reopened store and post office in 1899. Both were still running in the mid-1980s, and forty-one people lived at Camp Verde in 2000.

What the plaque says

Site of Camp Verde Established as a frontier post by the United States Army, July 8, 1855; headquarters in 1856 for 40 camels, sent by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, to be used in a system of overland communication with the west, which proved impracticable. Surrendered to the Confederate government in 1861; reoccupied in 1865 by the United States Army; abandoned April 1, 1869.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Schreiner Mansion — 11 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Frontier Times Museum — 12 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Treue der Union Monument — 14 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 23 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.

More markers nearby

• Penateka Comanches — 0.9 mi
• Camps Verde, C.S.A. — 0.9 mi
• Bandera Pass — 2.3 mi
• Center Point Cemetery — 5.8 mi