Montvale
Sterling City, Sterling County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The community of Montvale was established in 1884 when the pioneer settlement of St. Elmo was relocated here. Then a part of Tom Green County, Montvale was located on the Shafter Military Trail, an early road from Fort Concho. A community school, the earliest in the area, was in operation by 1886. Three years later the town was platted by H. B. Tarver, the surveyor for Tom Green County. It is believed the settlement was named for a nearby hill referred to in Tarver's field notes as Mt. Vale. Early businesses in Montvale included the saddle and harness shop of R. B. Cummins and the general store and blacksmith shop of B. Z. Cooper. The town was also the site of a Methodist church, a hotel, a post office and a variety of stores. About 1889 R. B. Cummins started the town of Cummins (5.4 miles northwest) upriver from Montvale. Both settlements began to decline in 1891 with the establishment of Sterling City (3.5 miles northwest) as the seat of government for the newly created Sterling County. A community cemetery is all that remains of the townsite of Montvale, a pioneer settlement that played an important role in the area's development. (1982)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Montvale sprang up in 1884 when settlers relocated the earlier community of St. Elmo to a spot along the Shafter Military Trail, an old road running from Fort Concho. Within a few years it had a school, a platted townsite, a Methodist church, a hotel, a post office, and a cluster of stores and shops. But the creation of Sterling City as county seat in 1891 drained the town's fortunes, and today only a community cemetery marks where it stood.
Why it matters
Montvale is a classic West Texas ghost town, showing how the placement of a railroad or a county seat could make or unmake a pioneer settlement almost overnight.
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Related people
- · H.B. Tarver
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Concho, San Saba & Llano Valley Railroad Station
Sterling City, TX
When the Concho, San Saba and Llano Valley Railroad pushed a line into Sterling City in 1909, it was chasing the wealth of West Texas ranch country—livestock that needed a way to distant markets. A boxcar served as the first depot until this mission revival station rose to take its place, becoming the hub of a young ranching town. Highways and pipelines eventually siphoned away the freight, and the line went quiet in 1958, leaving the depot as the last witness to the rail era that built the area.
Site of Coughlin's Stage Stand
Mertzon, TX
This site marked a stopping point on the Southern Overland route that carried mail and passengers between St. Louis and San Francisco from 1858 to 1861, the great stagecoach line better known as the Butterfield Overland Mail. The spot was later used as an Army camp called Camp Charlotte. The state of Texas set the marker here in 1936.
Butterfield Stage Station at Grape Creek
Grape Creek, TX
When John Butterfield's Overland Mail Company won a federal contract in 1857 to carry mail between the Mississippi and the Pacific, stations sprang up a few miles apart to feed and rest drivers and swap out teams. Reporter Waterman Ormsby, the lone through-passenger on the 1858 inaugural run, praised Grape Creek as 'a fine stream' with welcome timber. The stop, first a corral of staked timber and later a more permanent post, seeded one of Tom Green County's oldest settlements before the route left Texas in 1861.
Original Tom Green County
San Angelo, TX
When it was created in 1874, Tom Green County sprawled across nearly 12,800 square miles of West Texas — more than ten times the size of Rhode Island — astride the California gold-rush trail and the old Butterfield Overland Mail route. Named for Confederate general and Texas statesman Thomas Green, it drew German colonists, cattlemen like the Tankersleys, and settlers who pressed in despite earlier resistance from Native peoples. Over the following decades the giant county was carved into more than a dozen smaller ones as the railroad and new towns reshaped the region.