Valley Creek Station

The ranch community the plaque ends on took the name Shep from Andrew Martin Sheppard, who kept a ranch, a store and the post office, open from 1903 to 1923. The first settler, John Robert Crayton, came in the 1870s. The first school, a one-room log cabin on Spring Creek, doubled as a church; the Methodists organized about 1881. In 1920 a French pilot and an Englishman who had known a Shep soldier in the war landed in a pasture and sold rides at five dollars. A tornado struck on April 28, 1985, killing one person.

What the plaque says

(site located 2 mi. northwest) Near this site, an important link in the frontier transportation system was an area landmark. The Butterfield Overland Mail maintained a stage stop at the falls and crossing of Valley Creek beginning in 1858. The twice-weekly mail and passenger line stretched from San Francisco to St. Louis, crossing the southwest corner of Taylor County and passing six miles west of present Abilene. The path through Texas, known as the Oxbow Route, added about 600 miles to the 2,800 mile trip. The line moved out of Texas in March 1861, leaving this area sparsely settled. Ranchers later settled near Spring, Cottonwood and Valley creeks, and established the nearby community of Shep in the 1880s. (1968, 2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Chadbourne — 11 mi
  An 1852 infantry post and Butterfield stage station on a Coke County ranch, its fallen stone buildings rebuilt since 1999 by the descendant of the family that has ranched the land since 1877.
• Abilene State Park — 14 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.
• Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel — 15 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.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Pumphrey — 8.0 mi
• In Vicinity of Coronado's Camp — 11 mi
• Site of Old Communities of Mazeland and Wilmeth — 11 mi
• Near Site of Indian Battle — 13 mi