Longfellow

Longfellow, in the extreme southern corner of Pecos County, is the third of the railroad water stops along this line to have emptied out for the same reason, and its dates tell the story almost without commentary. The railroad named it, around 1881, for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which makes a nice pairing with Pumpville sixteen miles down the track: one station named for a poet and one for a piece of machinery. A post office opened in 1890 and the place became the headquarters of the Longfellow Ranch, so for a while it was doing two jobs at once, servicing locomotives and shipping livestock. Both were undone by better transport. Improved highways let the surrounding ranches take their trade to Sanderson, and the post office was gone by 1933. Then the railroad withdrew in the same sequence it used everywhere on this line. The freight and telegraph office closed in 1944, when diesel engines came in. The water column and the well that had been the original reason for the settlement were abandoned in 1954. By the mid 1980s what stood at Longfellow was the ranch headquarters and the ruins of the railroad buildings. Pumpville lost its water service in 1955 and Longfellow in 1954, within a year of each other and for the same stated cause, which gives a fairly exact date for when this part of Texas stopped needing the people who lived in it.