Cline Community

Pingenot's stage stop on Turkey Creek stood near the Old Spanish Trail and served travelers bound for Brackettville or the silver mines near Chihuahua City. He named its inn for William A. A. (Bigfoot) Wallace, who carried the mail there. In the 1880s Pingenot's wife, Minnie, and her sister Sophie boarded railroad and mine workers and teachers, while stage passengers dined at Cline's. Cline had about seventy-five people in 1892. By 1927 it was the end of a rail spur from asphalt mines twenty miles southeast, and it peaked at about 250 people in 1940.

What the plaque says

Cline Community (1/2 mi. S. of this site) First settler, Celeste Pingenot came to this area in 1870. He built first house on south bank of Turkey Creek, 1871. Established stagecoach stand, store and inn; named it Wallace. He was first postmaster, commissioned, 1878. Community protected from Indians by small detachment of soldiers billeted at "The Spring," nearby. August Cline was employed by Pingenot to operate store and stagecoach stand. When railroad came in 1883, built rock house and post office on north bank. Became postmaster. Renamed community, Cline. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Briscoe-Garner Museum — 18 mi
  The Uvalde house of John Nance Garner, the vice president who made the office a power in Congress, now a free museum to him and to Governor Dolph Briscoe.
• Uvalde Grand Opera House — 18 mi
  An 1891 Victorian opera house on the Uvalde square with a turret and a dragon weathervane, once owned by John Nance Garner and still staging volunteer theater upstairs.
• Fort Inge Historical Site — 20 mi
  A county park on the Leona River below a 140-foot volcanic plug, where an army post guarded the new road to El Paso from 1849 to 1869 and Texas Rangers camped after.
• Fort Clark and the Old Guardhouse Museum — 21 mi
  The 1852 post at Las Moras Springs, home from 1872 to 1914 of the Black Seminole scouts, now a gated resort with its old guardhouse open as a museum on weekends.

More markers nearby

• Chalk Bluff Indian Massacre — 11 mi
• Reading Wood Black — 17 mi
• John Nance Garner — 17 mi
• Pat Garrett — 17 mi