Martin's Gap

Who was Martin? The plaque says Jim Martin was killed by Indians in the 1860s and buried on the mountain, and the Fairy Cemetery plaque says he reportedly died while traveling through. The Handbook entry on Fairy says only that James Martin was an early settler who took an oxcart through the gap. No source names the nation of the attackers; the plaque's own word is Indians. So the killing rests on local tradition, and the gap's name outlived it, giving way in 1884 when the post office took the name of Captain Fort's daughter.

What the plaque says

Martin's Gap Mountain burial site for frontiersman Jim Martin, killed here by Indians in 1860s, when county had fewer than 500 people. Gap bore his name for 20 years. Settled in 1873 by Capt. Battle Fort, Confederate veteran and lawyer. A post office established 1884 was named Fairy to honor Mrs. Phelps, Fort's beloved young daughter. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hamilton County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A limestone courthouse of 1886-87 on the Hamilton square, built after the county's 1878 courthouse burned, enlarged in the early 1930s and rededicated in 2012 after restoration.
• Meridian State Park — 17 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Bosque Museum — 24 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Dublin Bottling Works — 27 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.

More markers nearby

• Fairy Cemetery — 0.2 mi
• Old Hico — 7.2 mi
• Olin Baptist Church — 7.5 mi
• Hamilton County, C.S.A. — 8.0 mi