Annie Riggs Memorial Museum

The building went up in 1899 as the Koehler Hotel, a long single-story adobe with deep verandas and gingerbread trim in the Territorial style. Its museum is named for the woman who owned it for nearly thirty years. Anna Stella Frazier was born near Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1858 and came to Fort Stockton with her family after the Civil War. Her first marriage, at 19, lasted a little over ten years.

In 1891 she married Barney Kemp Riggs, a gunman who had been sent to the Yuma penitentiary for murder in Arizona and pardoned by the governor for saving the warden's life during a riot. Riggs was shot in an argument with Annie's son-in-law from her first marriage, and Annie sat with her former husband in a room of the Koehler Hotel until he died the next day. He left no will, his estate went to her, and she used it to buy the hotel for $5,000. She ran it as a boarding house until her death at 73 in 1931, and her heirs gave it to the Fort Stockton Historical Society in 1955.

One hotel room shows what a guest found around 1905, down to the iron bed Annie ordered from Sears and Roebuck for $6.75; the kitchen has the first electric stove in Fort Stockton, bought in 1922. One room holds the desk from the 1883 courthouse where Sheriff A. J. Royal was shot in 1894. No one was ever indicted, and the society says the bloodstains are still in the drawer.