This is the fourth location for Fort Bliss, which today encompasses more than 1.3 million acres in Texas and New Mexico. The fort’s historic district, with more than 340 contributing structures, focuses on the parade ground, which represents the fort’s five construction periods between 1891 and 1939.
The gentle curve of the parade ground follows the topography of La Noria Mesa. Assistant Quartermaster Captain George Ruhlen was responsible for the plan of the fort and the design of its first buildings constructed between 1891 and 1893. Ranged around the parade ground are officers’ quarters, barracks, and administrative and workshop buildings. The two most notable are the Headquarters and Barracks (1893, George Ruhlen) and the so-called Pershing House (1910; 2012 rehabilitated, Wright and Dalbin Architects). The original mess hall, library, and headquarters is a three-story, 33,321-square-foot gabled building, with simplified Colonial Revival and Queen Anne decorative elements, flanked by two-story galleried wings. The Pershing House, named for General John J. Pershing, who commanded Fort Bliss between 1914 and 1916 (and who led the U.S. forces in Europe during World War I), is a symmetrical two-story house with a wide wraparound verandah on painted wooden columns and broad window bays each side of the entrance, and a low-pitched hipped roof. A single eyebrow dormer looks out above the entrance bay. A kitchen wing is at the house’s rear. The house is based on the standardized U.S. Army building plan number 243.
At the east of the parade ground’s curve, replicas have been constructed of the earliest one-story adobe buildings from the period of the 1840s and 1850s, when Fort Bliss was at Coon’s Rancho and Magoffinsville. They contain exhibits on fort history and military life.
Fort Bliss expanded during World Wars I and II. Today it is the headquarters of a military reservation that stretches seventy-five miles north from El Paso County into southeastern New Mexico, with a varied mission from basic training of new recruits to development and training for surface-to-air missile systems and training of allied and NATO forces. By the early twenty-first century, one of every four people in El Paso County was associated with Fort Bliss.