Brewster County Courthouse
Alpine, Brewster County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Courthouse Building erected in 1887 when Brewster County was created. Served Buchel and Foley County until these areas where added to Brewster County . Courthouse Square still is community center for various events. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. 1965..
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Erected in 1887 as vast Brewster County was carved out of the Big Bend country of far West Texas, this courthouse anchored civic life in the frontier town of Alpine. It served the neighboring Buchel and Foley counties too, until those areas were folded into Brewster. Generations later, the courthouse square remains the gathering place for community events.
Why it matters
The courthouse marks the arrival of organized government to one of the last and most remote frontiers of settled Texas.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Alpine
Alpine, TX
When the railroad reached this spot in 1882, a spring-fed settlement sprang up that would soon be called Alpine. Missionaries followed the settlers, and in 1893 the First Baptist Church of Alpine was formally organized, worshipping in an adobe sanctuary by 1896. As the congregation grew alongside the town and its new teachers' college, it filled community gaps — running a borrowing library where there was no public one and supporting scouting, youth, and mission work.
J.C. Carr-Bob Slight House
Alpine, TX
Early settler J.C. Carr built this house in 1884 using the time-honored Southwestern method of laying double adobe-brick walls at night so they dried slowly to great strength. In 1903 it passed to Judge R.B. Slight, an English law clerk who had come west to be a cowboy after watching Wild West shows, and who added five adobe rooms and lived here for half a century. A rancher, merchant, and civic leader, Slight helped found what became Sul Ross College.
Ritchey Hotel, 1886
Alpine, TX
Built in 1886 of frame and adobe, the Ritchey Hotel rose beside the cattle-loading pens of the Southern Pacific Railway in the vast, remote Big Bend country. Here cowhands and ranchers who had driven stock in from scattered ranches could find a bed, a drink, and company while waiting to ship their cattle east by rail. It captures the moment when the railroad transformed West Texas ranching from an isolated frontier trade into part of a national market.
First Methodist Church
Alpine, TX
A circuit-riding preacher organized this Methodist congregation in the far West Texas town of Alpine in 1884, and by 1889 residents had raised an adobe church whose altar section still survives. In the sparsely settled Big Bend country, the building served not only Methodists but Baptists and Presbyterians alike, a shared house of worship on a thin frontier.