Fort Lincoln: The Frontier Post That Lasted Three Years

A few miles south of the town of D'Hanis in Medina County, a historical marker stands near the site of a military post that exemplified the speed at which the United States Army tried to build a frontier defense in Texas during the years immediately after the Mexican War.

Fort Lincoln was established on July seventh, eighteen forty-nine, on the west bank of Seco Creek, by Major James Longstreet commanding two companies of the Eighth United States Infantry. Longstreet would go on to become one of the most consequential generals on either side of the Civil War, serving as Lieutenant General Robert E. Lee's senior corps commander and earning the nickname Old Pete from his troops. At the time he planted Fort Lincoln in the south Texas scrub, however, he was a twenty-eight-year-old major doing survey work on the frontier.

The fort was named for Captain George Lincoln, an Eighth Infantry officer who had died at the Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican War in eighteen forty-seven. It was one of eight posts that formed the first permanent line of federal frontier defense in Texas, stretching from Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande north to Coffee's Bend on the Red River, a cordon designed to protect the thin line of settlement pushing westward into Comanche and Apache territory.

By eighteen fifty-one, Fort Lincoln had barracks for two companies, a hospital, and a warehouse, all built of wood. By eighteen fifty-two it was closed. The official reasoning was that the frontier had moved west faster than anticipated, rendering the position redundant. It had existed for barely three years, but the pattern it represented, rapid construction, brief occupation, and abandonment as settlement pushed forward, describes nearly a dozen Texas frontier posts of the same era.

The land reverted to ranching, and today nothing remains of the fort except the marker and the memory carried in the county histories.