Sites of Texas & Pacific Railway Depots

A railroad can also take a town's trade away. In the early 1880s ranchers drove cattle to Colorado City from as far north as Amarillo, as far south as San Angelo and from eastern New Mexico, and held great herds there until rail cars were available. Then the Fort Worth and Denver reached Amarillo in 1887, the Santa Fe reached San Angelo a year later, and business fell sharply. A population estimated as high as 6,000 in 1884 and 1885 dwindled. Salt mining was important in the 1890s, and farmers brought a second boom after 1900.

What the plaque says

Sites of Texas & Pacific Railway Depots Rail service to Colorado City began on April 16, 1881, when a Texas & Pacific supply train arrived with materials for the construction of a freight and passenger depot in the town. Completed the following month at the foot of Oak Street, it was similar in style and size to A T & P Station in Fort Worth. Cattle pens were constructed later to the east of the station on land donated by Aaron W. Dunn, John Wesley Mooar, W.H. Snyder, and George W. Waddell. The railroad and stockyards established Colorado City as the major shipping center and supply station for the vast ranching region of West Texas and sections of Eastern New Mexico. W.A. Crowder came here in 1885 as the agent for the T & P Railway. During his 35 years of service, local rail traffic flourished. Trains brought the necessary manufactured products for local ranches such as barbed wire and windmills. Goods shipped from here to Eastern markets included cattle, hides, salt, ice, wool, and buffalo bones. The 1881 depot was later destroyed by fire and replaced by a new freight station in 1896. Another depot, built at the foot of Walnut Street in 1907, was used by passenger trains until service to the city ended on March 22, 1967. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heart of West Texas Museum — 0.3 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 5.6 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.
• Scurry County Museum — 20 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 24 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.

More markers nearby

• Texas & Pacific Railway — steps away
• The Founding of Colorado City — steps away
• Mitchell County — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Colorado City — 0.2 mi