El Fortin de la Cienega
Shafter, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built along Cienega Creek in the mid-19th century and modeled after his headquarters ranch complex at nearby El Fortin del Cibolo, El Fortin de la Cienega was the second property developed by Milton Faver as he expanded the vast ranching empire he began in Presidio County in the 1850s. Faver chose a defensive site surrounded by hills and the creek to build a fortified adobe structure to serve as the Cienega ranch headquarters. The natural springs on the property were tapped to provide the needed water resources for stock raising and gardens. Also located at the Cienega site were dwellings, work rooms, stone corrals, fences, and holding pens. The primary activity at El Fortin de la Cienega was cattle ranching, and Milton Faver employed several families as vaqueros (cowboys) and laborers. Following Faver's death in 1889 his property was divided between his wife Francisca and his son Juan Faver, who received title to La Cienega. After Juan's death in 1913 his heirs sold the Cienega complex to neighboring ranchers John A. Pool, Sr. and J. W. Pool. It remained the property of the Pools and their heirs, the Greenwood family, until the 1980s. (1995)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the mid-19th century rancher Milton Faver built El Fortin de la Cienega, a fortified adobe compound on defensible ground along Cienega Creek, as the second headquarters of the vast Presidio County ranching empire he began in the 1850s. Natural springs watered the cattle, gardens, corrals and workers' dwellings, and Faver employed Mexican vaquero families to run the operation. After his death in 1889 the property passed to his son Juan and later to neighboring ranchers, remaining in their families until the 1980s.
Why it matters
Faver's fortified ranch shows how the earliest Anglo cattle empires took hold in the isolated Big Bend borderlands, blending defensive frontier architecture with the Mexican vaquero labor that built the Texas cattle industry.
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Related people
- · Milton Faver
- · Juan Faver
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
La Morita Ranch
Shafter, TX
La Morita was the third ranch that Milton Faver carved out of the Big Bend borderlands of Presidio County in the nineteenth century. A Midwesterner turned Chihuahua Trail merchant and freighter, Faver moved his family to the region by 1857 and built a ranching empire spanning thousands of acres of sheep and goat country. At La Morita, abundant springs fed a system of pools and ditches, and his hands raised adobe dwellings, stone fences, and corrals in the traditional style of the frontier Southwest.
Brooks Cemetery
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George H. Brooks fought in a California volunteer unit during the Civil War before settling in remote Presidio County in the 1860s and marrying Ygnacia Reza, a native of Mexico. The family cemetery began in 1904 with the burial of their son Albion, and it grew to hold Brooks kin, a former Texas Ranger, and friends and relatives from the Fuentes and Gonzales families. Still active and tended by the Shafter community, it remains a living record of a borderland family.
Here Milton Faver
Shafter, TX
In the 1850s Milton Faver established the first Anglo-American-owned ranch in the Big Bend country, an isolated empire of springs at Cibolo, Cienega, and La Morita. To hold this ground against Apache raids, he built three fortress-like quadrangular adobe compounds, ranching in a borderland far beyond the reach of law or army.
Milton Faver Ranches
Shafter, TX
By the 1880s Milton Faver, who had come to the Presidio country from a store and freighting business at Presidio del Norte, controlled vast reaches of the county — including most of its best permanent springs. His three fortified ranches, El Fortin del Cibolo, El Fortin de la Cienega, and La Morita, made up the largest single landholding around, worked with adobe and stone buildings, corrals, and irrigation systems and stocked with the county's biggest herds. After Faver and his family died, the lands were sold off in the wake of a lawsuit, and later ranching families — the Dawsons, Pools, and Greenwoods — worked the former Faver range into the late twentieth century.