Butterfield Overland Stages

Young County got ready for the stages in 1858. Its commissioners appropriated $150, a sizable sum then, to cut a new road through timber and prairie east from Fort Belknap, while Jack County opened thirty miles of road less than two weeks before the first coaches. Waterman Ormsby, one of the first westbound passengers, said the whole stretch between Gainesville and Belknap was new. Historian Rupert Richardson wrote that Belknap, where the line left thinly settled North Texas for country with almost no settlers, grew fast into a thriving frontier village.

What the plaque says

Butterfield Overland Stages The Butterfield Overland Stages connecting St. Louis and San Francisco with semi-weekly service, 1858-1861, traversed this county, with a station at Fort Belknap.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Belknap — steps away
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 9.2 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.

More markers nearby

• Colonel William C. Young — steps away
• Major Robert S. Neighbors — steps away
• Camp Belknap, C.S.A. — steps away
• Military Road (Ft. Belknap-San Antonio) — steps away