Morgan Jones

Fort Worth was the first town to profit from Jones's speed. In 1876 the Texas and Pacific had stalled at Eagle Ford, sixteen miles east, and stood to lose its state land subsidy if it did not reach Fort Worth before the legislature adjourned. Jones took the job, townsmen laid track while wives brought food, and crews worked day and night at a little more than a mile a day. Legend says Representative Nicholas H. Darnell was carried in on a stretcher daily to vote against adjournment. The rails reached Fort Worth on July 19, 1876.

What the plaque says

Welsh-born Morgan Jones arrived in the U.S. in 1866. As a contractor for numerous railroad lines, he became a railroad legend by laying tracks spanning more than 1,000 miles across Texas and the West. He was president of the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway Company by 1884, and in 1906 began to construct the Abilene and Northern Railway. In 1908 Jones moved to Abilene, continuing railroad expansion by completing the Abilene and Southern Railway. He made extensive investments throughout Texas and contributed to Abilene's growth until his death. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 0.8 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 — 13 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.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 13 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 — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• James Winford Hunt — steps away
• Claiborne Walker Merchant — 0.2 mi
• Willis, Thomas Middlebrook — 0.3 mi
• James Harrison Parramore — 0.9 mi