The Texas & Pacific Railway: First Railroad Across West Texas

The building that reached Abilene was Jay Gould's push. He organized a syndicate in the fall of 1879 to finish the line, and track laying began at Fort Worth on April 1, 1880; the rails reached Sierra Blanca on December 16, 1881. Huntington's builders, working east under the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio charter, reached Sierra Blanca first, and under the Gould-Huntington Agreement of November 26, 1881, the Texas and Pacific stopped there, ninety-two miles short of El Paso. Its construction from 1873 to 1881 entitled it to 12,441,600 acres of Texas land.

What the plaque says

Chartered March 3, 1871, by act of U.S. Congress, to build a railroad to the Pacific coast, the Texas & Pacific Railway Company, under leadership of Colonel Thomas A. Scott, president, began construction across West Texas in 1880. General Grenville M. Dodge, civil engineer and builder of the Union Pacific, was in charge. The first train reached the Abilene area in early January 1881 and a station opened for business here on February 28, 1881. The office was in a boxcar at the present Pine Street Overpass. As a policy during its era of construction, the Texas & Pacific promoted the settlement of west Texas. Encouraged by local ranchers, agents of the railway held on March 15, 1881, the first auction of lots in Abilene townsite. On that day 178 lots were sold for $27,550.00. The wisdom of the purchasers has since been well confirmed, for Abilene is now the business, agricultural, transportation, medical, educational and cultural center for central west Texas. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 0.3 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.
• 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.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 14 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.
• Abilene State Park — 17 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

• Abilene Reporter-News — steps away
• Taylor, Edward, James, & George — 0.2 mi
• 45th Infantry Division at Camp Barkeley — 0.2 mi
• James Harrison Parramore — 0.6 mi