History
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…
Military
Camp Peña Colorado
The United States Army put a post at the springs on Peña Colorada Creek in August 1879, about four miles southwest of where Marathon would later stand, and kept it for thirteen years. The siting was deliberate on several counts at once: the place lay on the road between Fort Clark and Fort Davis, on the surveyed route of the coming transcontinental railroad, and within supporting distance of Fort…
Architecture
The Gage Hotel
Alfred S. Gage was a Vermonter who came to Texas in 1878 to help his brother survey and sell land, and who ended up with one of the great ranching operations of the Trans Pecos. He was living in San Antonio by 1900 and became a banker there, president of the Lockwood National Bank and of the city water company, and he built the ranch from that end rather than the other way round: in 1913 he…
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
