Fort Mason

Fort Mason stood on Post Oak Hill above Comanche Creek from 1851, and its water came from Gamel Spring nearby. Before the Civil War it was a cavalry post. What came after is the town's story.

When the Union army came back on December 24, 1866, it sent the headquarters company, the regimental band and Company F of the Fourth Cavalry under Gen. John Porter Hatch. Civilian artisans and soldiers repaired the post, but Reconstruction lawlessness reached the garrison too, with many desertions and courts-martial. The last inspection, on January 13, 1869, found twenty-five buildings, most of them empty and in need of repair, and sixty-nine men. The post closed on March 23, 1869. In September 1870 the state reopened it as headquarters for two companies of its new Frontier Forces under Capt. James M. Hunter, later county judge, and within a year it closed for good.

The buildings passed into private hands, and people from Mason took the stone down to build their own houses, so that pieces of the fort stand in homes around town. In 1975 a group of citizens began rebuilding one of the officers' quarters on the old site. It belongs to the Mason County Historical Society.