Callahan City

Callahan City's founders chose a water hole on the Western Trail, the route to Dodge City that carried nearly 100,000 cattle between 1874 and 1879. By 1877 the town had several merchants supplying trail drivers and settlers, though their goods came by wagon from Fort Worth and took a month to arrive. The Handbook of Texas says the town never prospered like the cowtowns of Coleman to the south or Albany to the north. When the Texas and Pacific Railway bypassed it and Belle Plain in 1880, the end was certain. By the 1980s only the cemetery remained.

What the plaque says

Callahan County was created in 1858 and named for Texas Ranger James H. Callahan (1814-56). Permanent settlement of this area began after the Civil War (1861-65). Residents petitioned in 1877 for organization of county government. Callahan City, then a village with two stores and a post office, became temporary county seat when the first commissioners court met here on July 30, 1877. The nearby town of Belle Plaine won a spirited election for permanent county seat in December 1877. After the Callahan City post office moved there six months later, this community soon disappeared. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 19 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Frontier Texas! — 26 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 30 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.

More markers nearby

• Callahan City Cemetery — steps away
• Admiral Baptist Church — 3.4 mi
• Belle Plain — 4.4 mi
• Site of Belle Plain College — 4.4 mi