Fort Davis National Historic Site

The army established Fort Davis by an order of October 23, 1854, to protect emigrants, mail coaches and freight wagons on the Trans-Pecos stretch of the San Antonio-El Paso Road and on the Chihuahua Trail. The post changed hands during the Civil War and stood abandoned from 1862.

On July 1, 1867, four companies of the Ninth Cavalry under Lt. Col. Wesley Merritt reoccupied it. The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry were regiments of Black enlisted men under white officers, created by an act of Congress in 1866, and units of them served at Fort Davis from 1867 to 1885. They built the new post, guarded stage stations and water holes, escorted wagon trains, repaired the military telegraph and scouted against the Apache and Comanche. In 1869 Col. Edward Hatch sent three expeditions from here against the Mescalero in the Guadalupe Mountains. The fort closed in 1891.

Congress authorized the historic site in 1961, and it opened in 1963. More than twenty original stone and adobe buildings stand on 460 acres, restored to their appearance in 1880, and several, including officers' quarters and the post hospital, are open with period furnishings. A trail climbs from the fort into Davis Mountains State Park. The site is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on a few holidays.