Milton Faver Ranches
Shafter, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Milton Faver (ca. 1822-1889), a native of the midwest United States, moved to this area in the 1850s from Presidio del Norte, where he owned a general store and operated a freighting business on the Chihuahua Trail. By the 1880s, Faver controlled vast acreage in this part of the county, including most of the best permanent water sources, which he built into a formidable cattle, sheep, and goat ranching empire. Faver's three ranches-- El Fortin del Cibolo, El Fortin de la Cienega, and La Morita-- comprised the largest single-owner landholdings in the county. Structures on the ranches, including dwellings, work rooms, fences, corrals, and irrigation systems, were built with traditional adobe and stone building methods. Census and tax records show that Faver owned the largest livestock herds in the county in the late 19th century. Following the deaths of Milton Faver in 1889, his wife Francisca in 1893, and his son Juan in 1913, and after a lawsuit, the ranchlands were sold by the Faver heirs. Other pioneer ranching families in the area, including George and Juliana Dawson (niece of Francisca Faver), and J. A. Pool, Sr. and J. W. Pool and their heirs, the Greenwood family, operated ranches on the former Faver lands until the late 20th Century. (1995)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Faver's water-anchored empire laid the foundation for large-scale ranching in the Big Bend, and the families who followed him carried that pioneer legacy across more than a century of West Texas history.
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Related people
- · Milton Faver
- · Francisca Faver
- · George Dawson
- · Juliana Dawson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
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.
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.
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.