Presidio County
Marfa, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Bexar County created January 3, 1850, organized March 13, 1875. So named for the early "Fortress garrisoned by soldiers." Erected for the protection of the Big Bend missions. County seat Fort Davis, 1875, Marfa, since 1885. (1936)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Presidio County, carved from vast Bexar County in 1850 and organized in 1875, takes its name from the Spanish word for a fortified garrison — the presidios once raised to protect the missions of the Big Bend. Its seat of government moved from Fort Davis to Marfa in 1885 as settlement and the railroad reshaped the region.
Why it matters
The county's very name is a living echo of Spain's frontier fortifications, a reminder that Texas history reaches back through Mexican and colonial rule long before statehood.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Humphris-Humphreys House
Marfa, TX
Built in 1883 by local craftsman Saturnino Naborette, this Marfa home belonged to rancher and merchant John Humphris and his wife Mary, its central hall flanked by four rooms on each side in the plain, sturdy style of early West Texas. In 1915 schoolteacher Sally Humphreys bought the house and ran it as a boardinghouse until 1937. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1996, it survives as an example of frontier building methods.
Presidio County Courthouse
Marfa, TX
Built in 1886 of native stone and locally made brick, the Presidio County Courthouse rises over Marfa with a dome visible for miles across the Big Bend. It stands in the county's third seat of justice, after government moved first from Fort Leaton on the Rio Grande, then from Fort Davis, before settling in Marfa.
James Buchanan Gillett
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James Buchanan Gillett came of age on the far western Texas frontier, trading a teenage cowboy's saddle for a Ranger's badge at nineteen during the turbulent late 1870s. His years of service coincided with the last decades of open-range conflict, when Rangers policed a sprawling, thinly settled country. After leaving the force he pinned on an El Paso marshal's star and spent the rest of a long life ranching the dry high country around Marfa, later setting his experiences down in a memoir still read as an Old West classic.
William Edward Russell
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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.