U. S. Army Camp at Texas City

Army families lived in town while the soldiers camped. Enlisted men slept in tents about two miles out, and officers' wives took rooms in one of Texas City's two hotels. Mauree Mahin, a lieutenant's bride in 1913, remembered the hotel as drab but the company good. She also recalled lightning striking a column on the march to the Galveston target range, twenty-one miles away, and killing two brothers driving wagons. The Handbook of Texas counts 14,000 troops and 3,000 animals and says the August 1915 hurricane that destroyed the camp killed nine soldiers.

What the plaque says

U. S. Army Camp at Texas City An increasing number of disturbances along Texas' Rio Grande border after Civil War broke out in Mexico in 1910 prompted U. S. President William Taft to consider increasing the U. S. Military presence in the area. Hugh B. Moore, Texas City terminal railway executive, and Augustus B. Wolvin, developer of Texas City's port and owner of a steamship line, persuaded U. S. Officials to establish an army camp in Texas City as a strategic point for possible troop movements into Mexico. In March 1913 approximately 14,000 army personnel, comprising three infantry brigades, one regiment each of cavalry and field artillery, one battalion of engineers, one signal corps company, one field bakery, one field hospital, and an aviation squadron, set up camp here in an open field just north of town. The army camp's air squadron was the first of its kind in the nation. Pilots of the eight aircraft located here set flight records for distance and speed, and entertained spectators with flying exhibitions. A local economic boom brought on by the camp ended abruptly when a major hurricane destroyed the camp and damaged some buildings in Texas City in 1915. The camp was not restored and many of its personnel were later stationed along the Texas-Mexico border. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 8.6 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 8.7 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Moody Mansion — 9.0 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 9.1 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Shoal Point and Half Moon Shoal Lighthouse — steps away
• William Jefferson Jones — steps away
• Wedell's Corner — steps away
• First Aero Squadron — 0.4 mi