La Morita Ranch
Shafter, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established in the 19th century, La Morita Ranch was the third ranch established in Presidio County by Milton Faver. A native of the midwestern United States, Faver had moved to Presidio del Norte in the 1850s, where he operated a mercantile store and a freighting business on the Chihuahua Trail. He moved his family to Presidio County by 1857, bought land and established his headquarters ranch on Cibolo Creek. By the 1870s Faver's ranching operations extended over thousands of acres. He recorded title to land along Las Moras Creek in October 1880 (probably well after his occupation of the site) and it became the headquarters for his large sheep and goat raising operations. Abundant springs at La Morita provided a steady source of water, and Faver had a system of pools and ditches constructed to divert the water for his ranching needs. Also built at La Morita were stone fences, corrals, and pens, as well as dwellings using traditional adobe building methods. In September 1889 Faver turned over operation of La Morita to George Dawson, the husband of his wife's niece, Juliana. Three months later, just days before his death, Faver deeded the property to Juliana Dawson. It remained in the Dawson family until 1966. (1995)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Faver was one of the first Anglo cattle and sheep barons of the Trans-Pecos, and his fortified adobe ranches mark the beginnings of large-scale ranching in one of Texas's most remote and contested frontiers.
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Related people
- · Milton Faver
- · Juliana Dawson
- · George Dawson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
El Fortin del Cibolo
Shafter, TX
Built in 1857, El Fortin del Cibolo was the fortified heart of Milton "Don Meliton" Faver's ranching empire in the Big Bend country. Guided to the area's dependable springs, Faver seized control of the region's only steady water, irrigating vast gardens and a peach orchard whose crops fed soldiers at Fort Davis and the miners of nearby Shafter. Its thick adobe walls, corner towers, and gun ports made it the first major outpost between Fort Davis and the Rio Grande.
Milton Faver
Shafter, TX
Milton Faver — known in the borderlands as Don Meliton — parlayed a Chihuahua Trail freighting business and a Presidio del Norte store into the first great cattle empire west of the Pecos. Around 1857 he moved his family and vaqueros to the mountain country north of Presidio, fortifying his headquarters at El Fortin del Cibolo and adding ranches at La Cienega and La Morita, all watered by abundant springs. He engineered irrigation for grain, vegetables, and peach orchards, supplied the Army at Fort Davis, and lived, by all accounts, as a hospitable gentleman of means until his death in 1889.
William Edward Russell
Marfa, TX
William Edward Russell left Kentucky as a young man and worked his way into the Big Bend, trading along the Chihuahua Trail and keeping a store at the Horsehead Crossing of the Pecos. He became one of far West Texas's leading figures—rancher, merchant, farmer, and silver miner—founding the settlement of Ruidosa, where he dug irrigation ditches and ran a mill, and holding county offices including sheriff. With his wife María Tomasita Rodriguez he raised a family straddling the Texas–Mexico borderland he helped develop.