Comstock, in western Val Verde County, is a town on its second site and its second name. It was platted as Sotol City, east of where it stands now, presumably after the spiky desert plant that covers these hills, though no record actually says so. When the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway pushed through the county in 1882 and 1883, the whole townsite was moved to reach water from a natural lake nearby, and it took a new name from John B. Comstock, a railroad dispatcher. That is the pattern the railroad set all along this line. It decided where people lived and what the place was called, and the name a town chose for itself lasted only until the company had a better idea. A post office followed in 1888, the Phillips Hotel opened to travellers in 1889, and the D. C. Denny Lumber Yard in 1890, which later became Uncle Denny's Saloon and Billiard Hall. Comstock survives, twenty nine miles northwest of Del Rio, and it is a junction as well as a stop: State Highway 163 begins at the crossroads in the middle of it and runs two hundred miles north to Colorado City. The tracks through the town are the old Southern Pacific, the line the silver spike completed to the west in 1883. Southern Pacific was absorbed by Union Pacific in 1996, so the freight on it belongs to somebody else now.
Getting there
29.6850, -101.1743
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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