Alamo Village

Brackettville's economy had been sinking since the Army deactivated Fort Clark in 1946. In 1950 the town elected rancher James Tullis 'Happy' Shahan mayor, and he set out to bring Hollywood to Kinney County. In 1951 he persuaded Paramount to film Arrowhead in Brackettville. The Last Command and Five Bold Women followed. Then John Wayne's company, Batjac, chose Shahan's ranch for The Alamo.

From December 1957 until filming began in September 1959, Batjac's preproduction crew ran a $12 million building program, with as many as 400 workers on site at once. The plan had two parts: a facsimile of the Alamo in 1836 and the surrounding pueblo of San Antonio de Béxar. Artisans from Mexico made adobe bricks by hand, and more than a million of them went into 200,000 square feet of permanent buildings. Art director Alfred Ybarra based the Alamo on research that included plans the mission's Catholic builders had sent to Spain. Nothing was a false front. Wiring ran through more than ten miles of underground casing, and the crew built fourteen miles of road, a 4,000-foot airstrip and six water wells.

After The Alamo, Shahan took over the set and opened it to the public as Alamo Village, with a cantina, trading post, church, jail, blacksmith shop and museums. It also kept working as a backlot. Productions that needed an Alamo used it, including Viva Max (1969), The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987) and Alamo: The Price of Freedom (1988). So did Westerns, among them Bandolero! (1968), Barbarosa (1982), Lonesome Dove (1989) and Streets of Laredo (1995). Texas Film Commission records list more than 30 productions shot in Brackettville, from John Ford's Two Rode Together to the miniseries Centennial and the 1994 feature Bad Girls. Documentaries, music videos, commercials and television shows filmed there too. In summer, Alamo Village hired country singers, staged melodramas and shootouts, and ended the season with Labor Day horse races.

Happy Shahan died in 1996. His wife Virginia ran the village until her death in 2009, and the family then closed it. In August 2010, Alamo Village closed permanently.