Local History
Texas World War Historical Markers: From Cantonment to Victory
Six real Texas historical markers from World War I and World War II, from Camp Bowie in Fort Worth to the POW camp at the Wharton County fairgrounds. Addresses included.
Photo: Avi Werde / Unsplash. Texas and United States flags.
You've driven Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth without thinking about the name. It points to a place where a whole division of soldiers slept in tents before shipping out to France. Texas holds more than 16,000 official historical markers, and a lot of them sit on ground the Army and Navy once owned. RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform that tells you when you're about to pass one. Here are six real markers from both World Wars, with addresses you can drive to this weekend.
Fort Worth and Houston Trained Texas for the First World War
The United States entered World War I in April 1917. Texas got the training camps. The weather let troops drill year round, and the land was flat, cheap, and close to rail.
Camp Bowie in World War I is the marker to find in Fort Worth. It went up in 1973 and sits at the corner of Camp Bowie Boulevard and Thomas Place. The camp served as headquarters for the 36th Division, United States Army, from 1917 to 1919. Guardsmen from Texas and Oklahoma trained here before they crossed the Atlantic.
The boulevard kept the name. Almost nothing else did.
4100 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX 76107
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Camp Logan turned into a park. Houston's Memorial Park was a military installation first. The camp opened on July 18, 1917, named for Gen. John A. Logan, a Mexican War and Civil War veteran who later served as a U.S. senator from Illinois.
Camp Logan covered 7,600 acres. It held a main camp, an auxiliary remount depot for horses, a rifle range, an artillery range, and drill grounds. The camp closed on March 20, 1919. Part of the land became Memorial Park, named in tribute to the soldiers who fought in Europe. The Texas Historical Commission placed the marker in 1992, at Arnot and Haskell on the edge of the park.
Runners pass it every morning.
Arnot St and Haskell St, Houston, TX 77007
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Camp Maxey and Camp Wolters: Two Camps, Two Different Wars
Camp Maxey exists because Paris, Texas asked for it. In 1940 the city sent a request to the Army, betting that peacetime draftees would revive the county's economy. Congressional politics sent the first camp elsewhere. Local officials kept pushing. The Army activated Camp Maxey on July 15, 1942.
The reservation covered 70,000 acres. It took its name from Sam Bell Maxey, the Confederate general and U.S. senator who lived in Paris. Two infantry divisions trained here, the 102nd "Ozark" and the 99th "Checkerboard," along with the 250th Field Artillery.
The numbers on the plaque are the part people stop for. A total of 194,800 soldiers passed through. Area residents filled 10,300 civilian jobs on the base. Local women organized a group called the Maxey Command to host dances for the troops. A regional hospital operated on the reservation, and so did a stockade holding 7,000 German prisoners. The camp closed in early 1946 once the prisoners were gone.
The marker stands at the old Gate 5, where the stone portals still frame an entrance to nothing.
Camp Maxey, US-271, Powderly, TX 75473
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Old Camp Wolters started with horses. The marker at 3801 Ram Blvd. in Mineral Wells went up in 1997. It records a camp established in 1925 and named for Brigadier General Jacob F. Wolters, who commanded the 56th Cavalry Brigade of the Texas National Guard.
The camp began as a summer training site for horse-mounted cavalry units. Sixteen years later the Army converted the same ground into an infantry replacement training center. Tens of thousands of riflemen cycled through on their way to the war. One patch of Palo Pinto County covered the whole gap between the cavalry horse and the rifle squad.
3801 Ram Blvd, Mineral Wells, TX 76067
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Corpus Christi Turned Out 35,000 Navy Pilots
France fell to Germany in June 1940. The Navy suddenly needed aviators, and it needed places to make them. Coastal south Texas fit. The terrain was flat, the weather allowed year-round flying, fuel was close, and the bays gave the Navy seaplane training water.
Naval Air Station Corpus Christi was commissioned on March 12, 1941. The first cadets arrived that month and pinned on their wings on November 1. Before the war ended, the station out-produced every other airfield in the country and graduated 35,000 aviators. People started calling it the University of the Air.
Two of those cadets became famous later. George H. W. Bush earned his wings here. So did John Glenn. Trainees also came from Canada, England, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. The marker went up in 2010 along SH 358, the road locals call NAS Drive.
NAS Drive, Corpus Christi, TX 78418
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
The Prisoner of War Camp Behind the County Fairgrounds
Texas held roughly twice as many prisoner of war camps as any other state. More than 45,000 German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners sat out the war here between 1942 and 1945. Over 27,000 of them worked Texas farm jobs, picking cotton and pulling corn while local men were overseas.
Site of World War II Prisoner of War Camp in Wharton tells that story on one plaque. The land came out of an 1824 grant to Martin Allen, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists. In the 1840s Allen's heirs sold most of it to Albert Clinton Horton. He was a Wharton County planter, a Texas Revolution veteran, and the state's first lieutenant governor.
Horton's heirs sold the property in 1930 to investors who wanted a county fairground. Buildings went up. The county bought the land in 1942. A year later the Army established Camp Wharton on the site as a branch of Camp Swift in Bastrop County. Crews converted the old fair buildings for the prisoners and the U.S. Army. The men worked as farm laborers across Wharton and Colorado counties.
The marker went up in 1991 at 2015 Junior College Blvd. Fairgrounds, then a camp, now a plaque.
2015 Junior College Blvd, Wharton, TX 77488
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Most of these markers sit on roads you'd drive anyway. The problem is you're at 65 miles an hour and the plaque is a brown blur. Discovery Mode solves that. The app watches your location and notifies you as you approach a marker, so you know to slow down before you've already passed it.
The plaque gives you a paragraph. The AI Tour Guide answers the questions the paragraph leaves open, like what the 99th Infantry Division did after it left Camp Maxey. Offline mode keeps all of it working in Palo Pinto and Lamar counties, where cell coverage drops out for long stretches. Stopping at a marker is preservation. Someone fought for that plaque, and reading it keeps the story in circulation.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
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