Alleyton and the Cotton Road

The railroad reached Alleyton in 1860 and then stopped, which left this small place as the westernmost railhead in Texas at exactly the wrong moment in history. When the Union blockaded the Texas coast during the Civil War, cotton could no longer leave through Galveston, and cotton was very nearly the only thing the Confederacy had to sell. So the crop came here by rail from across the interior, was transferred onto wagons at the end of the line, and went overland instead. What followed was one of the strangest supply lines of the war, run largely by teamsters and freighters rather than by soldiers, and grinding on for years. For a few years the western end of the Confederacy's entire export economy was a wagon yard in Colorado County. The route was called the Cotton Road. It ran from Alleyton southwest past the King Ranch to Brownsville, then across the Rio Grande into Matamoros, which was neutral Mexican territory and therefore beyond the reach of any blockade. For a few years Matamoros became the largest cotton market in the world, and dozens of ships waited off the bar at the river mouth. The wagons came back north loaded with rifles, powder, cloth, boots and medicine, which went onto the railroad here at Alleyton and travelled on to the rest of the Confederacy. Alleyton today is a handful of buildings beside the interstate, with a historical marker recording that for four years the supply line of a war ran through it on a several hundred mile detour around the United States Navy.