Fort Chadbourne

Companies A and K of the Eighth Infantry founded the post on Oak Creek on October 28, 1852, and named it for Lt. Theodore Lincoln Chadbourne, killed at Resaca de la Palma in the Mexican War. It stood in country where the Comanche ranged, and there were clashes through the 1850s, including a skirmish inside the post in 1856. From 1858 to 1861 it guarded a station on the Butterfield Overland Mail, and coaches stopped four times a week. Federal troops surrendered it to Confederate Col. Henry E. McCulloch on February 28, 1861. The Army came back briefly after the war, but short water and wood and poor buildings led to its abandonment in 1868.

Thomas Lawson Odom founded a ranch around the ruins in 1877, and his descendants have run it since. One of them, Garland Richards, watched an old fort wall collapse on a wet day and decided it would be the last. In 1999 he and his wife Lana set up the Fort Chadbourne Foundation, and with archeologists and volunteers they stabilized the ruins and rebuilt several buildings, including officers' quarters and the Butterfield stage station, from excavation evidence and old photographs.

The digs have turned up more than half a million artifacts, many on view in the visitor center. The site is a national historic site on a working ranch, about eleven miles northeast of Bronte.