Fort Belknap

Bvt. Brig. Gen. William G. Belknap founded the post on June 24, 1851, as the northern anchor of a chain of forts from the Red River to the Rio Grande. The first site, where Newcastle's water tower now stands, gave no water in shafts dug 66 feet deep, so the fort moved two miles south to springs by the Brazos. It had no walls. Its roads ran in every direction, and the Butterfield Overland Mail between St. Louis and San Francisco stopped here.

In 1854 Randolph B. Marcy laid out the Brazos Reservation twelve miles south of the fort. About 2,000 Caddo, Anadarko, Waco and Tonkawa people settled there, farmed 600 acres and sent men as scouts for the Rangers and the Army. It did not protect them. Settlers blamed every raid on the reservation, a Jacksboro newspaper called the White Man fanned the hatred, and in December 1858 men from Erath County killed seven people of Choctaw Tom's hunting party in their blankets; no one was indicted. In May 1859 John R. Baylor led several hundred men onto the reserve. Robert Neighbors, supervisor of the Indian agencies in Texas, moved the people north to the Washita valley in Indian Territory; they left on July 31, 1859.

The Army gave up the fort in 1861, came back briefly in 1867 and left for Fort Griffin. Local people rebuilt several buildings for the 1936 Centennial, and the Fort Belknap Society keeps the grounds, a museum in the old commissary and the archives of North Texas.