Milton Faver Ranches

Faver began buying here on August 9, 1858, with 320 acres from A. C. Hyde, and paid $2,000 to Juana Pedrasa Leaton y Hall to give up her rights to Cibolo Spring. His lands are now the core of Cibolo Creek Ranch, nearly 30,000 acres in the Chinati and Cienega mountains joined from the former White and Greenwood ranches. The ranch runs one of the largest purebred longhorn herds in the country and in the 1990s reintroduced elk, buffalo and wild turkey. The name comes from the Cíbolas, a people who lived along the creek.

What the plaque says

Milton Faver Ranches Milton Faver (ca. 1822-1889), a native of the midwest United States, moved to this area in the 1850s from Presidio del Norte, where he owned a general store and operated a freighting business on the Chihuahua Trail. By the 1880s, Faver controlled vast acreage in this part of the county, including most of the best permanent water sources, which he built into a formidable cattle, sheep, and goat ranching empire. Faver's three ranches-- El Fortin del Cibolo, El Fortin de la Cienega, and La Morita-- comprised the largest single-owner landholdings in the county. Structures on the ranches, including dwellings, work rooms, fences, corrals, and irrigation systems, were built with traditional adobe and stone building methods. Census and tax records show that Faver owned the largest livestock herds in the county in the late 19th century. Following the deaths of Milton Faver in 1889, his wife Francisca in 1893, and his son Juan in 1913, and after a lawsuit, the ranchlands were sold by the Faver heirs. Other pioneer ranching families in the area, including George and Juliana Dawson (niece of Francisca Faver), and J. A. Pool, Sr. and J. W. Pool and their heirs, the Greenwood family, operated ranches on the former Faver lands until the late 20th Century. (1995)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Leaton State Historic Site — 24 mi
  The adobe trading post on the Rio Grande below Presidio, where digging has rewritten the stories told about it and a self-guided walk leads through its rebuilt rooms.

More markers nearby

• Milton Faver — 0.7 mi
• Here Milton Faver — 5.0 mi
• Brooks Cemetery — 5.2 mi
• Site of Alamito — 15 mi