The Pinery Butterfield Station

The Pinery was a stage station of the Butterfield Overland Mail, named for the pine forests above it and watered by Pine Spring. At 5,534 feet it was the highest station on the line. When the first coaches came through in September 1858 it was little more than a corral of heavy pine timber and a couple of tents. Within two months the station had a high-walled rock enclosure with a single entrance, three mud-roofed rooms built against the inside walls, a blacksmith shop and wagon repair shed, and a ditch bringing water from the spring to a tank inside. The walls of limestone slabs and adobe stood 30 inches thick and 11 feet high.

The station keeper was Henry Ramstein, a surveyor from El Paso, with six to eight men working as cooks, blacksmiths and herders. Four times a week the conductor's horn announced a coach with up to nine passengers, who got fresh horses and a meal. Soldiers were sometimes posted here against raids, which is why the ruin was later taken for a fort.

The line ran past the Pinery for only eleven months. In August 1859 the Butterfield moved its route south to a road by way of Fort Stockton and Fort Davis, better protected and better served by the chain of military posts, and ten stations on the Guadalupe route were abandoned. A paved, wheelchair-accessible trail of three quarters of a mile leads from the Pine Springs Visitor Center to the ruins. The walls are fragile, so stay off them.