Town of Buffalo Gap

Two old roads met here. The present Farm Road 89 follows the Center Line Trail, surveyed in 1874 from Texarkana to El Paso, and another road through the gap forked toward Pecos County and Tom Green County. Eighty-seven voters cast ballots in the county's first election. By 1880 the town had 1,200 people, a drugstore, a big hotel, a jail and a saloon; buffalo bones gathered nearby were sold for sugar refining. It called itself the "Athens of the West." The Santa Fe Railroad finally came through in 1895, years after the county seat had gone.

What the plaque says

Probably named for the pass in Callahan Divide (mountains) crossed by thousands of buffalo that once inhabited this area. Besides providing the native Apache and Comanche Indians with food, buffaloes drew the first white hunters here, about 1874. First homes in present town were dugouts of buffalo hunters. The community began to grow in 1878 when it was named county seat and was located on the western cattle trail. In 1883, however, the new railroad town of Abilene became county seat and Buffalo Gap, like so many small Texas towns, lost prestige. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 0.4 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 — 5.0 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.
• Frontier Texas! — 13 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.
• Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel — 24 mi
  A free museum in a Winters optometrist's office, a 1909 railroad hotel and a 1927 implement dealership, with Rogers Hornsby's hometown memorabilia and a 1912 horse-drawn cotton picker.

More markers nearby

• Buffalo Gap College — steps away
• The Ernie Wilson Museum — 0.4 mi
• Taylor County — 3.9 mi
• The Civilian Conservation Corps at Abilene State Park — 4.3 mi