Picket Quartermaster Storehouse

Picket Quartermaster Storehouse. . At this location stood a picket house 83' long by 18' wide with a porch on this side. Built sometime in the mid to late 1850's, it was later used as a store house in the 1867-1869 period. At some time during its existence it was used as a dwelling by a family with a small child. The quartermaster was the officer in charge of issuing all non-food supplies at the fort, such as tools, tents, equipment, weapons and ammunition., A picket house (or jacal in Spanish) was one of the most common types of construction on the early Texas frontier. The Spanish introduced the practice of using posts planted upright in the ground, plastered with mud when they established missions, forts and ranches in the 1700's. Later both Mexican and Anglo-American settlers continued this tradition. This type of construction needed only local materials and unskilled labor to produce a cheap, quick (although crude) house at new settlements., To build a picket house a shallow trench was dug in the outline of the proposed house. Next, posts were stood upright close together in the trench. Small rocks and dirt were tamped back in at the base of the post and the spaces between the posts were filled with sticks, rocks and clay. The walls were then plastered with a final coat of clay or lime., Most of the first picket houses here were roofed with thatch; however, this house seems to have had a shingle roof of cypress singles from the Frio River. Records show that most houses had wooden floors made of hand sawed boards. Described as being in "an advanced state of decay" in 1868, most of the picket houses at the fort fell down or were torn down by the army around 1870 when they salvaged the building materials for reuse at Fort Clark., Archaeological investigations here in 1981 located the outline and studied the nature of this building. Only the large limestone threshold stone was showing on the surface at that time. The outline of the walls was traced by the small limestones, charcoal and plaster that had filled the original setting trench. The present outline of rocks follows the line of original rocks below the surface. The drawing above is based on a 1867 drawing of the fort showing this building.