Smith's Station

Smith's Station was one link in a chain of stops that kept the Butterfield mail moving across northwest Texas. Eastbound from Fort Phantom Hill, a coach covered twelve miles to Smith's, twenty-six more to the Clear Fork station, thirteen to Franz's and twenty-two to Fort Belknap. Coaches carried five or six passengers, and travelers rode without rest, since a passenger who laid over forfeited his seat and might wait a month for another. The remote site is reached only on foot across ranch country, and this entry gives no route.

What the plaque says

Smith's Station From 1858 until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, a station of the Butterfield Overland Mail Route was located here. Despite a brief existence, it was an important stop of the early stage line that reached from Missouri to California. Stages made the trip in under 25 days, a marked improvement on earlier communication links with the rapidly developing west. Located on Chimney Creek between stage stops at Clear Fork (26 miles northeast) and Fort Phantom Hill (12 miles southwest), Smith's Station was the only Butterfield stop located in present Shackelford County. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Phantom Hill — 10 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.
• Old Jail Art Center — 13 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Frontier Texas! — 21 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 Griffin State Historic Site — 23 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.

More markers nearby

• Goodnight-Loving Trail in Shackelford County — 0.9 mi
• Bud Matthews Switch of the Texas Central Railway — 2.1 mi
• Big Country Baptist Assembly — 8.0 mi
• Fort Phantom Hill — 10 mi