Seminole Camp

Seminole Camp was a frontier Black Seminole Indian community on Las Moras Creek south of the site of what is now Brackettville in Kinney County. Around 1870 some 150 Black Seminoles formed the nucleus of a community located south of Fort Clark. Several members of this population were enlisted as scouts in 1871 by Zenas Randall Bliss and organized into a company of Black Seminole scouts stationed at Fort Clark. Around 1874 several hundred Black Seminoles from Mexico moved to Seminole Camp, bringing the total population of the community to an estimated 500. A Mount Zion Baptist Church, built to resemble the First Church of Salem, Massachusetts, was established in the community soon thereafter. Seminole Camp was abandoned after the closing of the Fort Clark reservation in 1914. Many Seminole Camp residents moved to Brackettville, taking their church with them. By the 1950s some descendents of the original inhabitants of Seminole Camp were still living near Brackettville, and the Black Seminole scout burial ground had become a tourist attraction. By 1977 the Seminole Indian Scout Association, whose membership included descendents of the original Fort Clark scouts, was holding annual fund-raising events for the preservation of the Seminole Cemetery.