Carthage-Tokay-Farley

Tokay took its name not from coal but from a very sweet grape and the wine made from it. It grew on the southwest side of the Carthage coal field, about ten miles east of San Antonio, where the San Antonio Coal Company opened mines; production rose steadily from 1915, and in time the camp went from rail service to trucks. Commercial mining ended in the late 1940s. Farley grew around a limestone quarry and its kilns. Geologists still use Tokay as a formal stratigraphic name, so the town survives in the names of the rocks.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Carthage Tokay-Farley In the 1860s, a coal field east of San Antonio was occasionally mined by soldiers for heating fuel and to fire their blacksmith ovens. In 1883, the Santa Fe railroad built a bridge across the Rio Grande at San Antonio and laid track to the new coal mining town of Carthage. The settlements of Farley and Tokay sprang up around the nearby lime kilns and coal mines.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A Rio Grande refuge south of Socorro where cranes and geese winter by the tens of thousands on wetlands and fields kept by people, because the river no longer floods to make them.
• Trinity Site — 20 mi
  Where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945, open one day a year, and remembered by its neighbors as the start of decades of illness the government took eighty years to acknowledge.

More markers nearby

• Trinity Site — 3.1 mi
• San Pedro — 7.2 mi
• San Antonio — 8.8 mi
• Socorro — 15 mi