Texas Cattle Trail

Albany grew up beside the trail. Within months of the 1875 lot sale, drovers headed up the Western Trail to Dodge City were using the new town as a supply point. When the Texas Central Railroad reached Albany in December 1881, the town became a shipping point for cattle, and the Handbook of Texas notes that cattle and sheep ruled the local economy until oil arrived in the twentieth century. The Cook field came in in 1926, but ranching stayed central: since 1920 the town's slogan has been "Albany, the Home of the Hereford."

What the plaque says

In Memory of TEXAS CATTLE TRAIL - To Dodge City, Kansas and other northern points 1875 - 1890. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Jail Art Center — steps away
  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.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 14 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.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 23 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.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 29 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• Lt. Col. William E. Dyess — steps away
• Shackelford County — steps away
• Dr. Jack Shackelford — steps away
• Robert Edward Nail, Jr. — steps away