Castle Peak

Castle Peak, about eight miles south of Merkel, is the one prominent landmark in a flat country. Its first name came from Lt. Col. J. J. Abercrombie, who brought five companies of the Fifth Infantry to the Clear Fork of the Brazos on November 14, 1851, to build Fort Phantom Hill, from which the peak and its range could be seen. The Handbook of Texas describes the summit as Tarrant rock outcrop under mesquite, cedar, brush and grasses. The marker stands about two and a half miles northeast of it.

What the plaque says

The Butterfield Overland Mail, the first public transportation facility spanning the area from the Mississippi to the Pacific with passenger and mail service, 1858-61, used the 2400-foot peak to the northeast as a beacon. The drivers and passengers viewed it for 30 to 40 miles. In that era it was called Abercrombie Peak, for Colonel J. J. Abercrombie of the U.S. Army, active in defense of this frontier. Waterman Ormsby, a newspaper reporter riding the first Butterfield Stage to pass this way, noted that the peak resembled a fortress. Later the height was renamed Castle Peak. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 11 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Abilene State Park — 12 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Frontier Texas! — 15 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 — 24 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

• Mulberry Canyon — 5.7 mi
• Cornelia Clark Fort — 5.7 mi
• Butterfield Mail and Stage Line — 6.8 mi
• Mountain Pass Station — 7.1 mi