Young's Store

Ft. Stockton, TX

In the cattle-and-railroad West of 1870s Texas, a sturdy field-stone building rose in the frontier outpost of Fort Stockton, hard by the old military road and springs of the Trans-Pecos. By 1884 Herman Koehler had turned it into a one-stop hub of frontier commerce — a saloon at one end and a general store and bank at the other — later crowned with a second story as the town grew. Buildings like this were the true civic centers of remote Texas towns, where a rancher could wet his throat, buy provisions, and settle accounts under one roof.

Fort Stockton, TX

Harvard-trained lawyer Oscar Waldo Williams came to Texas in 1876 seeking a drier climate and threw himself into the opening of the West Texas frontier, surveying newly settled lands and serving as Pecos County's deputy surveyor and later county judge. From an office he built in Fort Stockton around 1915, he became an authority on land law and water rights and turned his eye to the region's emerging oil and gas leases. A tireless observer, he also wrote widely on the history, folklore, and natural history of the Southwest.

Fort Stockton, TX

Carved from Presidio County in 1871 and organized in 1875, Pecos County chose Fort Stockton as its seat and elected its first slate of officials that March. The names on that roll—Frazer, Torres, Rooney, Carrasco, Huffmann—reflect the mingled Anglo and Tejano leadership of the far West Texas frontier. Decades later, the 1926 discovery of oil in the Yates field transformed the county's fortunes.

McCamey, TX

McCamey sprang up almost overnight in 1926 when a wildcat well came in, and within a year some ten thousand people had rushed to the new oil town. Named for driller George B. McCamey, whose discovery well opened dozens of fields across Upton County, it settled into a durable life of ranching—horses, sheep, and goats—once the boom cooled. Its parks and the Mendoza Trail Museum keep the memory of that frenzied birth alive.