Emerald Townsite
Ozona, Crockett County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first platted town in Crockett County, Emerald was founded in 1889 by Fort Worth & Rio Grande Railway Immigration Agent T. W. Wilkinson. It was to be an agricultural shipping point on a planned extension of the F.W. & R.G. Publicized from Maine to Minnesota for mild climate and fertile land, it acquired a post office on April 8, 1890. Mail came from San Angelo via Knickerbocker (50 miles northeast). Charles Hatch and E. C. Moore were successive postmasters. In August 1890 the town was in the path of a prairie fire. Although valiant work turned the fire, it was visible for two nights before and two nights after it circled the town. Also in 1890, the county's first school session was held in a tent in Emerald by Mrs. John Noyes. After a frame schoolhouse was built, Mrs. John Ketchpaw taught there. Miss Ada Williams taught the last school term in the spring of 1893. Confident it would be the county seat, Emerald nevertheless lost in the election of 1891 to the E. M. Powell water well site (now Ozona). Wilkinson protested, to no avail. After the residents began to move to the Powell Well, Emerald Post Office closed on December 7, 1891. The townsite thus became one of the many colonization failures in West Texas.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Emerald, the first platted town in Crockett County, was founded in 1889 by a railway immigration agent who advertised its mild climate and fertile land from Maine to Minnesota, hoping it would sit on a rail extension and become the county seat. It gained a post office, held the county's first school in a tent, and survived a prairie fire in 1890. When it lost the 1891 county-seat election to the site of present Ozona, residents drifted away and the post office closed, leaving Emerald one of West Texas's many failed colonization schemes.
Why it matters
Emerald is a classic Western ghost town, a monument to the railroad-fueled land promotions that conjured towns overnight and abandoned them just as fast.
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Related people
- · T. W. Wilkinson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
One Fourth-Mile North to Ruins of Fort Lancaster
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Established by the U.S. Army in 1855 above the junction of Live Oak Creek and the Pecos River, Fort Lancaster guarded travelers and mail on the long overland road between San Antonio and the far West. Garrisoned by the Second Cavalry, it was abandoned in March 1861 after Texas seceded from the Union, then briefly reoccupied by federal troops in 1868. Nearby, the deep ruts of one of the most-used pioneer fords of the Pecos are still visible where wagon wheels dragged down the hillside.
Powell, Ernest Malapert
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Illinois native E. M. Powell came to Texas in 1874 and worked as a surveyor during the railroad boom, often taking land in payment and building up a 185,000-acre holding in present Crockett County. To draw settlers he advertised in newspapers and offered the first families forty acres of free land plus discounts on more. Ozona was founded on his property—complete with a public well, windmill, and lots for churches and a school—and his efforts led to Crockett County's organization in 1891 with Ozona as county seat.
Comstock-Ozona Stage Stand, Site of
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In the early 1900s these flagstone ruins were a working stage stand, the first stop on the mail-and-passenger run linking Ozona to the Southern Pacific railhead 80 miles away at Comstock. A stage leaving Ozona at 5:00 a.m. arrived here about 8:30 to find fresh horses already harnessed, while the agent's family lived in a tent floored with flagstone beside rock pens for livestock. The automobile made the whole operation obsolete around 1914, though the old wagon ruts still scar the land.
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