Camp Verde General Store and Post Office

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, you're rollin' through Kerr County, and if you think this stretch of road has seen some ordinary history, friend, you are in for a correction. Let's talk about the Camp Verde General Store and Post Office — and yes, before we're done, there will be camels.

There will absolutely be camels. Back in 1857, a mercantile business opened up out here, going by the name of the Williams Community Store. It was set up to serve the trade around Camp Verde Army Post — which, right about that same year, became the site of something the United States War Department cooked up that nobody in Texas, or frankly anywhere else on this continent, was entirely prepared for.

The War Department ran a camel experiment at Camp Verde Army Post. An honest-to-goodness camel experiment. From 1857 all the way through 1869, that post was in the camel business, and the Williams Community Store was out here keepin' the whole surrounding community supplied while all of that was unfoldin'.

Now, the store kept on. The camels eventually did not — at least not at Camp Verde — but the store? It endured.

Thirty years after those doors first opened, in 1887, a post office joined the operation. So you had your goods and your mail, right here in the Hill Country, at a place that had watched one of the stranger chapters in American military history play out just down the road. The Camp Verde General Store and Post Office.

Some places just quietly outlast the extraordinary, and this is one of them.

What the marker says

Mercantile business opened 1857 as Williams Community Store, serving trade around Camp Verde Army Post (site of U.S. War Department's 1857-69 camel experiment). Post office opened in 1887. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1971