Mount Inge, a 140-foot plug of volcanic rock, rises over the east bank of the Leona River a mile south of Uvalde, and people have camped in its shelter for about 8,000 years. On March 13, 1849, Capt. Seth Eastman, a frontier artist as well as an officer, set up camp here with two companies of the First Infantry. Renamed that December for Lt. Zebulon Inge, killed in the Mexican War, Fort Inge belonged to the first line of federal forts in Texas. Its soldiers guarded the building of the military road from San Antonio to El Paso, escorted mail and supply trains, and patrolled the border.
It was usually a one-company post of about fifty men, though in 1854 it briefly held 200 as headquarters of the Mounted Rifles. Its roster reads like a list of later generals of both armies, from William J. Hardee and Edmund Kirby Smith to Gordon Granger and Fitzhugh Lee, and the Texas Ranger William "Bigfoot" Wallace served here in 1850. After the Civil War, companies of the Black Ninth Cavalry and Forty-first Infantry held it, the last under Lt. John L. Bullis, until the army closed it on March 19, 1869. In 1871 troops came back to pull down buildings for their timber and stone, for Fort Clark.
Rangers camped on the site until 1884, and then it was farmland until Uvalde County made it a park in 1961. Archaeology and archival work in 1980 to 1982 recovered the plan of the post. The town that grew a mile upstream became Uvalde.
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