Gail Borden

The plaque gives the plant's dates; the Handbook of Texas adds the money and the reason it failed. In 1872, the year the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio line came through, Borden put $125,000 into the Borden Meat Preserving Company, and in 1873 it built a slaughterhouse for twenty-five cattle a day. After his death the plant closed because the railroad charged more to ship processed meat than live cattle. The settlement he had named Bordenville kept a post office from 1874 to 1905 and counted twenty people in 2014. The site is on private land.

What the plaque says

Gail Borden Site of the beef canning plant and residence, built in 1872, by Gail Borden (1801-1874), pioneer surveyor, newspaper editor and inventor of the process of condensing milk, who operated this plant until his death. Demolished in 1885.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — 8.8 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 9.1 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 12 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 15 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.

More markers nearby

• Old Osage — 3.5 mi
• Weimar Railroad Depot — 5.7 mi
• Town of Weimar — 5.7 mi
• Etta Moten Barnett — 5.7 mi