The Old Corn Trail was an important military and civilian travel route in this part of West Texas. Its history is preserved in a state historic maker near the site of the old road. the marker reads as follows:
"THE OLD CORN TRAIL
Surveyed in 1850 by Army engineers, this was the first wagon road to penetrate this area. Point of origin was San Antonio, site of U.S. Army District Headquarters after annexation of Texas in 1846. This segment of road extended from Fort Gates (in Coryell County) to Fort Griffin (Shackelford County) and Fort Belknap (Young County). Although used for communications and troop movements, most common traffic was in supplies--especially feed for Army horses and mules. Hence the name "Corn Trail." Presence of the road and its traffic from fort to fort encouraged settlement. In 1851 John A. and J. M. McGuire moved to a site near here on Indian Creek. James H. Neel settled on Resley's Creek in 1852; in 1854 James Mercer and Capt. Frank Collier pitched tents on Mercer Creek, soon to be joined by their families and the Holmsleys and Tuggles. Collier put up first log house; Holmsley plowed first furrow. By Christmas of 1855 there were enough citizens here to petition for a county, and Comanche County was created by the Texas Legislature Jan. 25, 1856. The Corn Trail was a main civilian thoroughfare, and continued to serve its original purpose as a route for frontier troops and supplies. (1967)"
From Country World News website, some more history of this important old wagon road: (
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"The Old Corn Road
Tuesday, 29 July 2014 12:51 Clay Coppedge E-mail Print
(June 26, 2014) — Roughly a hundred years before Fort Hood, in the same general vicinity, was Fort Gates, the last in a series of forts built by the Army to protect settlers and travelers headed for the California gold fields from Comanche and Apache warriors. It was also the first of the forts to be abandoned.
The fort was by the Leon River, right outside present-day Gatesville. It consisted of 18 buildings, including a hospital, stable, hay barn and blacksmith shop. One of the six officers stationed there was Lt. George Pickett, who is remembered today and forevermore for leading the doomed and bloody charge up Gettysburg Hill in the Civil War.
Fort Gates was built alongside an old buffalo trail, which the Army surveyed and named Military Road. It has been described as being “straight as a gun barrel in places and as crooked as a pig tail in others, depending on the contour of the land.” The road was used to move provisions from the main supply depot in San Antonio to the forts strung across the West Texas frontier.
This was good news for farmers along the route, who not only found themselves with a market for corn, which grew exceptionally well in the area, but a road over which it could be carried. The highest bidder for the corn was the U.S. Army.
A supply road ran from the depot in San Antonio through New Braunfels, San Marcos and Austin into Bell County where it branched into two roads, one passing through present-day Temple and then north through Coryell County to Fort Gates. The other branch took a more westerly track to arrive at roughly the same spot.
In the course of delivery, kernels of corn would shake loose and fall to the ground. By spring of each year the trail was clearly defined by the stalks of corn growing along the road's course.
Early settler J.H. Chrisman wrote of the road: “We could trace the trail in advance as far as the eye could see by the row of corn. It was strange to see corn growing in the open prairie 50 miles from any inhabitant and where the farmers' plows had never penetrated the soil.”
Fort Gates was abandoned in 1852 and moved, pretty much in its entirity, to Fort Phantom Hill near Abilene, which connected with Forts Belknap and Chadbourne farther north. Fort Phantom Hill was by all accounts a hell-hole of a place to be stationed.
The main problem, then as now, was water, or lack of it. (Ironically, the old fort was located just a few miles from present-day Phantom Hill Reservoir, which provides water for the city of Abilene.) Forts Phantom Hill, Belknap and Chadbourne, located within 100 miles of each other, all essentially dried up; what wasn't heavy enough to withstand the West Texas wind blew away.
Explorer General Randolph Marcy laid out a trail through West Texas in 1849 for fortune seekers heading west to the newly-discovered California gold fields, and part of his trail included the Old Corn Road, though it wasn't old then. That's why there are so many California place names on the road west; there are a couple of California Creeks, a California Crossing, and in far West Texas a California Mountain.
Judging from Marcy's descriptions of a verdant West Texas, 1849 must have been a wet year, but a severe drought hit the area in the 1850s. Like the drought of the 1950s and the one now, this one lasted for several years and was long referred to as the “seven years drought.”
“Though fairly good crops of wheat and other grain were produced, the streams were so low that the water mills were nearly all shut down and but little flour could be had ... The stock industry too suffered a severe blow from the great drought of 1855 and subsequent years,” George Tyler wrote in his “History of Bell County.” “Nearly all of the smaller streams and springs dried up completely and most of the larger streams stood in isolated pools or tanks ... The calamity thus visited upon the farming and stock interests — the most productive resources of our people — was keenly felt and it very much retarded the general financial development in the period of the late fifties.”
The lesson history teaches us here, of course, is that water will always be a limiting factor for development in Texas, especially in the more arid western half of the state. History doesn't so much as repeat itself as it reminds us of hard lessons that all too often are forgotten all too quickly."