Butterfield Stage Station at Grape Creek
Grape Creek, Tom Green County, Texas
Marker Inscription
An early stagecoach stop near here provided the foundation for a frontier community. In the mid 19th century, stage lines were a primary means of moving people, mail and supplies through the region. John Butterfield, president of the Overland Mail Company, won a federal governmant contract in 1857 to take and deliver mail twice weekly in both directions between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast, linking the eastern and western states. Stations, positioned several miles apart, typically had a simple shelter and a corral for horses or mules, and provided a meal and brief rest for the stage drivers and passengers. Waterman Ormsby, a reporter for the New York Herald, was the lone passenger on the inaugural run along the Butterfield Trail from St. Louis to San Francisco in the fall of 1858. Heading southwest from Fort Chadbourne (Coke Co.), Ormsby wrote of arriving at a station on Grape Creek, "a fine stream, and also near some fine timber--two desirable things not to be found everywhere in Texas." Henry Roylan was in charge of a small contingent living in tents within the corral that was built of upright rough timber staked in the ground. The Butterfield Company later completed a more permanent facility, with a building and a palisade fence. Joel Pennington ran a store in conjunction with the station. The Grape Creek station was open until the spring of 1861, when the Butterfield route moved north out of Texas. Mount Nebo School, forerunner of Grape Creek Schools, opened near the station by 1861. The statecoach stop was the beginning of one of Tom Green County's oldest settlements. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When John Butterfield's Overland Mail Company won a federal contract in 1857 to carry mail between the Mississippi and the Pacific, stations sprang up a few miles apart to feed and rest drivers and swap out teams. Reporter Waterman Ormsby, the lone through-passenger on the 1858 inaugural run, praised Grape Creek as 'a fine stream' with welcome timber. The stop, first a corral of staked timber and later a more permanent post, seeded one of Tom Green County's oldest settlements before the route left Texas in 1861.
Why it matters
The Butterfield line was America's first transcontinental overland mail, and stations like this one turned lonely watering holes into the first threads of frontier community.
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Related people
- · John Butterfield
- · Waterman Ormsby
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Original Tom Green County
San Angelo, TX
When it was created in 1874, Tom Green County sprawled across nearly 12,800 square miles of West Texas — more than ten times the size of Rhode Island — astride the California gold-rush trail and the old Butterfield Overland Mail route. Named for Confederate general and Texas statesman Thomas Green, it drew German colonists, cattlemen like the Tankersleys, and settlers who pressed in despite earlier resistance from Native peoples. Over the following decades the giant county was carved into more than a dozen smaller ones as the railroad and new towns reshaped the region.
Major Ben Ficklin, C.S.A.
San Angelo, TX
Dubbed the "Mystery Man of the Confederacy," Ben Ficklin packed extraordinary adventure into 44 years: a corporal in the Mexican War at 18, a pioneer of Western stagecoach and mail lines, a founder of the Pony Express in 1860, and an early promoter of the transcontinental railroad. During the Civil War he ran Union blockades as a Confederate purchasing agent, and afterward won a U.S. mail contract, headquartering near Fort Concho—until he died in 1871 from swallowing a fish bone. A town later named for him became Tom Green County's first seat until an 1882 flood destroyed it.
Tom Green County
San Angelo, TX
Carved from the old Miller and Fisher land grant, Tom Green County was created in 1874 and organized the following year, taking its name from General Thomas Green, a San Jacinto veteran and Confederate officer killed in 1864. The first transcontinental mail routes had already converged nearby in 1858. The county seat began at Ben Ficklin in 1875 before shifting to San Angelo in 1882.
Ben Ficklin Cemetery
San Angelo, TX
When a catastrophic flood swept away the town of Ben Ficklin on August 24, 1882, it inundated the settlement's cemetery and exposed many graves. Charles B. Metcalfe chose this higher ground to reinter his relatives—including Col. Francis C. Taylor, the town's founder—and to bury his mother, sister, and uncle among the flood's victims. The site became the resting place of many Tom Green County pioneers, in a village and cemetery named for Ben Ficklin, owner of the San Antonio–El Paso mail line.