Home of Ben Leaton
Presidio vicinity, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First Anglo-American farmer in Presidio County. In August 1848, Mr. Leaton acquired the building and it has since been known as Fort Leaton. (1936)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Ben Leaton, remembered as the first Anglo-American farmer in Presidio County, acquired this adobe building on the Rio Grande in August 1848. Ever since it has been known as Fort Leaton, a fortified trading and farming outpost on the far West Texas frontier just as the region passed under U.S. control. The site marks the beginnings of Anglo settlement in one of the most remote corners of Texas.
Why it matters
Fort Leaton stands at the meeting point of Mexican, Native, and Anglo-American worlds along the Rio Grande, marking the arrival of U.S. settlement on the Texas frontier after the war with Mexico.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mission San Francisco de los Julimes
Presidio vicinity, TX
In 1683–1684, Franciscan father Nicolas Lopez and Juan Dominguez de Mendoza established a string of missions in the Big Bend country, of which San Francisco de los Julimes was one. The mission aimed to convert and settle the Jumano, Julimes, and other Native peoples of the Rio Grande region under Spanish colonial rule. It reflects the northern edge of Spain's missionary frontier in what is now far West Texas.
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
Shafter, TX
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
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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.