William Jeff Maltby

Before he settled in Callahan County, Jeff Maltby rarely stayed put. After service in Gray's Battalion of Arkansas Volunteers in 1846-47, he worked for the army from 1849 to 1855 as teamster, wagonmaster, scout and dispatch rider, and in 1856 ran a stage stop at Fort Clark on the San Antonio-El Paso road. Court-martialed by Reconstruction officials in 1864, he signed a Union loyalty oath and drove cattle to Calvert, New Orleans and Kansas. In 1874 he commanded Company E of the Frontier Battalion, and in 1891 he went to Chicago with the Texas agricultural exhibit.

What the plaque says

(December 7, 1829 - June 27, 1908) A native of Illinois, William Jeff Maltby gained fame as a frontiersman, veteran of the Mexican War and American Civil War and Texas Ranger. Maltby began his Texas exploits about 1850, building frontier forts for the U. S. Army. He retired to Callahan County in 1878 and developed a nursery that earned him national recognition as a fine horticulturist. Maltby co-authored a partial autobiography, published in 1906, called "Captain Jeff". Recorded - 1992.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 23 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.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 24 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.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 26 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 — 30 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.

More markers nearby

• Belle Plaine Cemetery — steps away
• Site of Belle Plain College — 1.7 mi
• Belle Plain — 1.7 mi
• Admiral Baptist Church — 4.6 mi