Yahoo Finance 9,000+ acres of ‘rare’ Texas ranchland is up for sale west of Fort Worth. Take a look
More than 9,300 acres of Big Country ranchland with a unique military history has gone on the market in North Texas.
Located about 125 miles northwest of Fort Worth and 65 miles from Abilene, the Tecumseh Ranch features more than eight miles of shoreline on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River and almost five miles of the Tecumseh Creek, according to Hall and Hall Partners, which is handling the bid collection process.
There is high expected interest in the property due to its “rare” location in Throckmorton County and amount of water resources in the area, said Tyler Jacobs, a real estate partner at Hall and Hall.
“Tecumseh Creek and the Clear Fork of the Brazos are both perennial live water,” Jacobs told the Star-Telegram. “Secondly, those ranches in Throckmorton and Shackelford counties, they just do not sell. Those are very, very tightly held markets.”
The ranch will be sold through a sealed bid process, which will keep offers in the hands of a third party and eliminate the chance for potential buyers to increase their bids in response to higher offers, Jacobs said. Bids for the property, which has been owned by members of the Matthews ranching family for most of its existence, are due on July 22.
In addition to its legions of canyons, limestone benches and mesquite flats, Tecumseh Ranch is also known as the original location of Camp Cooper, a U.S. military camp established on the Clear Fork of the Brazos in 1856.
Federal troops were dispatched there with the mission of protecting settlers and monitoring the nearby Comanche Indian Reservation, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
Robert E. Lee, who later became commander of Confederate troops during the Civil War, was in charge of Camp Cooper for 15 months between 1856 and 1857, according to the association.
Tensions between settlers and Native Americans declined after 1859, when the reservation dissolved and indigenous people were forcibly moved to Oklahoma. Camp Cooper was abandoned by federal troops in February 1861, just months before the Civil War began.
The camp’s ruins were sold by J.A. Matthews to J.B. Putnam in 1906, and a 1936 monument to the camp is located just north of the Tecumseh Ranch’s southern property boundary, according to Hall and Hall.
Today, Tecumseh can support a ranching operation of between 300 and 350 animal units, and comes with two sets of cattle working and shipping pens, a main barn, a manager’s house and a replica of the house where the original owners, John Alexander and Sallie Reynolds Matthews, lived beginning in 1878, according to the listing.
