Butterfield Stage Station

The first Overland Mail coach left Tipton, Missouri on 15 September 1858 and reached Los Angeles on 7 October, twenty-two days, and it changed horses here. The southern route was routed through Texas and the Gila country because Congress wanted a mail line that snow could not close. It ran twice a week for two and a half years and ended in March 1861, shut by the war it had been laid out to go around. The station is gone. The road it stood on is still Temescal Canyon.

What the plaque says

Where mail was delivered, horses changed and passengers given rest and a meal. First stage carrying overland mail left Tipton, Missouri, on Sept. 15, 1858 and passing through Temescal arrived in Los Angeles on Oct. 7, 1858. First dedicated by the History and Landmarks Committee, Corona Woman's Improvement Club, May 24, 1934 at the site of the stage station along Temescal Canyon Road. Rededicated Oct. 7, 2006 by the Corona Woman's Improvement Club.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wigwam Motel — 22 mi
  Nineteen concrete teepees on Foothill Boulevard, the last of Frank Redford's Wigwam Villages and still renting rooms.
• Original McDonald's Site — 25 mi
  The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.

More markers nearby

• Serrano Tanning Vats — 2.9 mi
• Ruins of Third Serrano Adobe — 2.9 mi
• Serrano Boulder — 3.4 mi
• Old Temescal Road — 3.9 mi