Site of the Courthouse at Rayner
Old Glory, Stonewall County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First county seat of Stonewall County. Erected in 1888. County seat removed to Aspermont in 1898. Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Rayner was the first county seat of Stonewall County, its courthouse erected in 1888 as the young county organized its government. Ten years later, in 1898, the seat of government moved to Aspermont, and Rayner faded. This 1936 state marker records where the county's first courthouse once stood.
Why it matters
County-seat contests like Rayner's shaped the map of settling West Texas, where a town's fortunes could rise or vanish with the location of the courthouse.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Mackenzie Trail
Old Glory, TX
The Mackenzie Trail followed corridors used for centuries, including a Comanche war trail and springs long relied on by Indigenous travelers; French and Spanish explorers and, later, U.S. officers like Marcy and Robert E. Lee passed through the region. In 1871 Colonel Ranald Mackenzie had Tonkawa scouts find a route from Fort Griffin to the High Plains for his campaigns against the Comanches and Kiowas, and he led hundreds of troops along it during those pursuits and the Red River War of 1874–75. Buffalo hunters, then ranchers and farmers followed, founding communities like Rayner, briefly Stonewall County's seat. By 1909 the railroad had replaced the trail.
Stonewall County
Aspermont, TX
The rolling country of Stonewall County holds a deep frontier history: Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado passed through in 1541, and U.S. Army mapmakers followed in 1849. Its salt springs supplied settlers, and from 1876 to 1879 the rough buffalo-hunters' town of Rath City reigned as a hide-trade capital. The county, created in 1876 and organized in 1888, honors Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and its seat shifted from Rayner to higher-set Aspermont in 1898.
Rath City
Aspermont, TX
During the buffalo-hide boom of the 1870s, Charles Rath founded this trading town in 1876 and opened a mercantile store to supply hunters and buy their skins. At its peak in 1877, an astonishing 1,100,000 hides were piled at his post, and the rough camp—also called Reynolds City—grew a corral, saloon, restaurant, and a lookout tower to watch for raids. When the buffalo were gone by 1879, the town vanished with them.
Site of Hitson Community
Rotan vicinity, TX
Ranchers John and William Hittson were among the first to settle here around 1870, and the community that grew near their homes took their name. A post office, school, store, and church followed, and oil discovered after World War I brought new income. Yet the labor drain of the Second World War left its small family farms unable to survive, and by the century's end only a few homes and a cemetery remained.