Albion Shepard

Marathon was named by a retired sea captain who thought the country looked Greek. Albion E. Shepard came to the Trans Pecos in the early 1880s as a surveyor laying out the railroad between El Paso and San Antonio, having spent his working life on ships, and tradition holds that when the new siding needed a name he offered Marathon, after the plain in Attica where the mountains come down to the sea. The comparison is not obvious in a desert four hundred miles from the Gulf, but it is a sailor's comparison: what he was matching was the shape of the ground, a flat floor ringed by hills, rather than the vegetation or the climate. Shepard did not merely pass through. On 10 March 1882 he bought fifty eight sections from F. W. Folts and established the Iron Mountain Ranch in the Glass Mountains along the northern line of the Marathon Basin, and that September he applied for a post office and became the town's first postmaster. The house he built still stands in Marathon and carries a state landmark designation. The name has outperformed any prediction that could have been made for it. He gave it to a railroad siding; the town took it from the siding, and the geological structure underneath took it from the town, so Marathon now appears in textbooks on the Ouachita mountain belt by way of a New England sea captain and a Greek battlefield.