Borden County
Gail, Borden County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Originally a part of Bexar District. Created August 21, 1876. Organized March 17, 1891. Named in honor of Gail Borden, 1801-1874. Pioneer surveyor, newspaper editor, and inventor of the process of condensing milk. Gail, county seat.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carved from the vast old Bexar District, Borden County was created in 1876 and organized in 1891, with Gail as its seat. Both the county and its town honor Gail Borden—surveyor, newspaper editor, and the restless inventor who perfected the process of condensing milk. His name thus marks a stretch of West Texas rangeland far from the industry that made him famous.
Why it matters
Naming a frontier county for an inventor like Gail Borden ties the settling of the West to the age of American ingenuity that was transforming how the whole nation ate and lived.
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Related people
- · Gail Borden
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Borden County Jail
Gail, TX
Built in 1896 of hand-hewn stone quarried from Gail Mountain, the Borden County Jail was engineered for maximum security on the West Texas frontier. Diebold Safe and Lock Co. won the $4,500 contract, lining the cells behind two-foot outer walls with third-inch case-hardened steel plates said to defy hacksaws. Its huge hasps and padlocks opened with a six-inch key.
1902-1904 Land Rushes
Gail, TX
When Texas courts threw open certain lands to public claim in 1902, the cowboys and nesters of Borden County raced one another to the county clerk's filing window. Ranchers sent hands wearing blue armbands to secure the range they already used; homesteaders wore red and rushed for the same acres. For three days before each deadline the two sides brawled bare-knuckled at the window, until Sheriff W.K. Clark disarmed everyone to head off bloodshed—and in the end, drought starved the nesters out.
Gail Cemetery
Gail, TX
When Borden County was organized in 1891 and the town of Gail rose as its county seat, landowners J.I. and L.E. Wilborn set aside part of the townsite for a burial ground — already in use that March for the grave of Fetnah Alexander. The cemetery gathered county sheriffs, cemetery trustees, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War, along with John Henry Smoot, the stonemason who built the courthouse foundation and carved many of the earliest headstones. A cemetery association and the county still tend the prairie graves as a link to the area's founding families.
Mushaway Peak
Gail, TX
Rising to 2,862 feet on the West Texas plains, Mushaway Peak has carried many spellings and long served as a landmark of Native American origin. Around 1872 a village near here was a trading point where Apaches and Comanches dealt with Comancheros tied to New Mexico's markets. As U.S. Army expeditions swept the region in the mid-1870s to force the last free bands onto reservations, the peak guided soldiers, buffalo hunters, and surveyors alike — before cattlemen claimed the valley in the 1880s.