Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site

Soldiers first tried a post at Buffalo Springs, twenty miles north of Jacksboro, in 1866, and gave it up as unhealthy. In November 1867 the Army set Fort Richardson on the east bank of Lost Creek, the northern end of a line of forts across the Texas frontier, and named it for Gen. Israel B. Richardson, killed in the Civil War. Its 55 buildings housed cavalry and infantry, Buffalo Soldiers among them, who patrolled as far as New Mexico and Colorado, guarded the military road southwest and helped keep the peace in Jacksboro.

The fort's purpose was to force the Kiowa and Comanche onto the reservations north of the Red River. After the Warren wagon train was attacked in 1871, the Kiowa leaders Satanta and Big Tree were tried in a civil court in Jacksboro and sentenced to hang, a sentence later commuted. Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's Fourth Cavalry rode from here to the Palo Duro in 1874, and the Army left in 1878.

Seven buildings survive. The post hospital, with sandstone walls 18 inches thick and a veranda around the ground floor, treated more men for disease, bad water and drink than for wounds, and its morgue stands behind it. In 1936 the Texas Centennial Commission bought the buildings and 41 acres. The Texas National Guard later trained here, among them Battery F of the 131st Field Artillery, part of the Lost Battalion captured on Java in 1942 and freed on August 15, 1945.