CAMP DAVIS, C.S.A.
By Joseph Luther
10.26.2009
It must have been “hell on earth”. Kerr County did not slumber through the Civil War. While no formal military engagements were noted, the area was awash in the blood and terror of the local conflict between Confederates and Unionists. Hangings, shootings, house burnings, and despoliation of farms were the reality of the Civil War in Kerr County.
James M. Starkey was appointed as Provost Marshall of Kerr County in 1862. He maintained a registry book listing all male citizens of Kerr County who were subject to conscription for service in the Confederate Army. The 130 names in the registry included many Unionists from the German communities. Seventy-five men from Kerr County served in Confederate and state forces. Nineteen men from county served in Texas Union forces. Others fought and died in unconventional warfare. Unfortunately, there is no courthouse marker commemorating the many individuals who fought, died and suffered in the Civil War.
In 1862, Gen. Philemon T. Herbert imposed martial law on Central Texas and ordered all males over 16 years old to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy or leave the state. Many refused to take the oath. As a consequence, their farms and homes were burned and some of the local residents, about 150 by some accounts, were lynched.
The notorious Confederate James Duff was put in charge of Gillespie and Kerr counties. Captain of an irregular Texas Confederate military unit, “Duff's Partisan Rangers,” he arrested Union sympathizers and destroyed their farms. Kerr County residents took to the hills to escape this reign of terror. Duff's command was later expanded into the Thirty-third Texas Cavalry. Joe Baulch, of Schreiner University, has written an excellent article on this sad affair – “The Dogs of War Unleashed: the Devil Concealed in Men Unchained."
Capt. Henry T. Davis of Duff's “Partisan Rangers” established Camp Davis in 1862. Also operating out of Camp Davis were "Minutemen" irregulars under the command of Major James M. Hunter, as well as Captain Duff’s forces who rode up in the night, snatched young men from their beds, hanged their parents, and burned their homes for avoiding conscription. Later, a squad from William Quantrill's command, fresh from Kansas atrocities, was led by Bill Paul; they made contact with James P. Waltrip who, emboldened by the Quantrill men, organized his friends and the Quantrill men into the infamous “hangerbande” (the hanging band or gang) that conducted terrorist raids throughout the area. In 1867, a crowd at the Nimitz Hotel in Fredericksburg shot Waltrip to death.
In the spring of 1864 William Banta, Captain of Company A of the Frontier Regiment, was stationed at Camp Davis. With J. W. Caldwell, he wrote an account of his life, Twenty-Seven Years on the Texas Frontier, published in 1893.