Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Brackettville, TX

Brackettville is the county seat of Kinney County, on U.S. Highway 90 about 22 miles northeast of the Rio Grande and 125 miles west of San Antonio.

The town was founded in 1852 as Las Moras, named for a nearby spring and the creek it feeds, as a supply stop on the old San Antonio-El Paso Road and a supply depot for the U.S. Army's Fort Clark, established the same year.

It was renamed Brackett for Oscar B. Brackett, who opened the first dry-goods store there in 1852, and became Brackettville in 1873 when a post office was awarded; it was designated the Kinney County seat in 1876.

For many years Fort Clark was a base of the famous Buffalo Soldiers, and Brackettville had a larger proportion of Black Seminole residents - descendants of escaped slaves who had lived alongside the Seminole in Florida - than the rest of West Texas.

According to Ethnologue, about 200 speakers of Afro-Seminole Creole live in Brackettville, making it the only town in the country where this creole language is still spoken.

The Seminole Negro Indian Scouts, an elite Army unit recruited from the Black Seminole community, were based at Fort Clark and were finally disbanded in 1914; virtually every cavalry unit in the U.S. Army was stationed at or trained at Fort Clark at one time or another.

In 1943 the Army activated the Second Cavalry Division at Fort Clark - its last horse-mounted unit - and before closing in 1946 the fort was used as a German prisoner-of-war camp.

Brackettville reached its peak population of about 3,500 in 1943 during the war years; the 2020 census counted 1,341 residents in 497 households.

After Fort Clark closed, the post was converted in 1971 into a resort and retirement community, and the Fort Clark Historic District is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

North of town stands Alamo Village, a full-scale replica of the Alamo built in 1959 as the set for John Wayne's film The Alamo; scenes from Lonesome Dove and other Westerns were also shot around Brackettville, though the village has been closed to the public since 2009.