Fort Sumner Park

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Location of old Fort Sumner. This outline is for the Fort Sumner Park, not of Fort Sumner. The fort itself, it appears, was slightly larger than the park. See the link below and see the center map.

On October 31, 1862, Congress authorized the creation of Fort Sumner. General James Henry Carleton initially justified the fort as offering protection to settlers in the Pecos River valley from the Mescalero Apaches, Kiowa, and Comanche. He also created the Bosque Redondo reservation, a 40-square-mile (100 km2) area where over 9,000 Navajo and Mescalero Apaches were forced to live because of accusations raiding white settlements near their respective homelands. The fort was named for General Edmond Vose Sumner.

After clsoing the fort, it was sold by the government to the Lucien family, the largest land grant holder of the day, who turned the fort into their private town.

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