Longfellow (Texas)
Longfellow was a place in Pecos County in the US state of Texas . Today it is the seat of the Longfellow Ranch, the place itself is a ghost town .
geography
Longfellow was in southwest Texas, 16 miles west of Sanderson near what is now US Highway 90 in the southernmost part of Pecos County. The place was at an altitude of 1027 meters above sea level.
history
The area around Longfellow was used by Mexican ranchers before 1860. With the construction of the railway line of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway in 1881 a stopping point of the railway was created . The railway company named the station after the American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Since the place soon developed into a loading station for the cattle from the wider area, a railway depot , a telegraph station and water tanks for the locomotives were built. In the vicinity of the place the railway company operated a quarry, in which ballast was produced for the railway construction.
In 1890 a post office was opened and the place became the headquarters of the Longfellow Ranch. With the construction of the highway in the mid-1920s, cattle transport increasingly shifted to the road, with larger and more easily accessible cities such as Sanderson in Terrell County Longfellow as a cattle loading station made unimportant. In 1933 the post office was closed, in 1944 the railway company stopped freight transport and closed the telegraph office. With the advent of diesel locomotives , the water tanks in Longfellow became obsolete, and the Southern Pacific Railroad completely abandoned the station in 1954.
Individual evidence
- ^ Justice, Glenn: Longfellow, Tx. . In: Handbook of Texas. Published by the Texas State Historical Association. Retrieved December 24, 2013.
Web links
Coordinates: 30 ° 10 ′ N , 102 ° 38 ′ W