Historical Marker
Butterfield Stage Station at Grape Creek
Grape Creek, Tom Green County · Texas
Erected 2008
The Grape Creek station was one stop on a mail line run to a clock. The contract John Butterfield won in 1857 paid $600,000 a year and required each trip across the 2,795 miles from St. Louis to San Francisco to finish within twenty-five days. Twice-weekly service ran from September 15, 1858, until March 1, 1861. Coming east, coaches crossed the headwaters of the Middle Concho, passed a camp or station in the vicinity of Carlsbad, covered twenty-two miles to Grape Creek, then went on to Fort Chadbourne, Mountain Pass and Fort Phantom Hill.
What the plaque says
Butterfield Stage Station at Grape Creek An early stagecoach stop near here provided the foundation for a frontier community. In the mid 19th century, stage lines were a primary means of moving people, mail and supplies through the region. John Butterfield, president of the Overland Mail Company, won a federal governmant contract in 1857 to take and deliver mail twice weekly in both directions between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast, linking the eastern and western states. Stations, positioned several miles apart, typically had a simple shelter and a corral for horses or mules, and provided a meal and brief rest for the stage drivers and passengers. Waterman Ormsby, a reporter for the New York Herald, was the lone passenger on the inaugural run along the Butterfield Trail from St. Louis to San Francisco in the fall of 1858. Heading southwest from Fort Chadbourne (Coke Co.), Ormsby wrote of arriving at a station on Grape Creek, "a fine stream, and also near some fine timber--two desirable things not to be found everywhere in Texas." Henry Roylan was in charge of a small contingent living in tents within the corral that was built of upright rough timber staked in the ground. The Butterfield Company later completed a more permanent facility, with a building and a palisade fence. Joel Pennington ran a store in conjunction with the station. The Grape Creek station was open until the spring of 1861, when the Butterfield route moved north out of Texas. Mount Nebo School, forerunner of Grape Creek Schools, opened near the station by 1861. The statecoach stop was the beginning of one of Tom Green County's oldest settlements. (2008)
Where it stands
31.60270, -100.55979 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- San Angelo State Park — 10 miA 7,677-acre park around O.C. Fisher Reservoir on the edge of San Angelo, where four Texas landscapes meet and the state's official longhorn herd grazes beside a bison paddock.
- Concho River Walk — 12 miFour miles of lit trails along the North Concho through downtown San Angelo, rebuilt after voters taxed themselves in 2004, with gardens, sculpture, a river stage and stocked trout.
- Miss Hattie's Bordello Museum — 12 miThe upstairs rooms on Concho Avenue where a brothel ran from 1902 until the Texas Rangers closed it in 1952, shown on short guided tours with most of the furnishings original.
- San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts — 13 miA free art museum on the Concho beside Fort Concho, founded in the fort's 1868 quartermaster building and known nationally for its biennial ceramics competition.