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Brewster County, Texas
Castolon, Texas
If you have any information, stories or photos of this town, please send it so I can post it to share with others. Thanks, Peggy Trammell Allen
Castolon, also known as Santa
Helena, was on the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park,qv
twenty-three miles southwest of Panther Junction in southwestern
Brewster County. The first known resident was Cipriano
Hernández, a native of Camargo, Chihuahua, who in 1903 bought
three sections of land on the American side of the Rio Grande five or
six miles downstream from the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon.
Hernández, who called the place Santa Helena, irrigated the
fertile bottomland and grew wheat, corn, oats, and other grains,
which he sold. He also opened the first store in the area.
Hernández's success
inspired others to move to the region, and Castolon soon became a
center of agricultural activity. Patricio Márquez opened a
second store; Agapito Carrasco settled six Mexican families about a
mile downstream from Hernández and called his community El
Ojito; and Ruperto Chavarria led a larger group of immigrants to the
west bank of Alamo Creek, two miles upriver from Castolon, and named
the settlement La Coyota. Eventually Castolon and the nearby
communities of El Ojito, La Coyota, Terlingua Abaja, and Buenos
Aires, five miles downriver, had some 200 or 300 residents, most of
whom engaged in subsistence farming. In 1910, at the outbreak of the
Mexican Revolution,qv the inhabitants requested protection from the
United States Army. By 1911 a cavalry troop was stationed at
Castolon. It was later supplemented by infantry units from Camp Marfa.
In 1914 Hernández sold
out to Clyde Buttrill, a prominent rancher in the Rosillos Mountains,
and moved to Terlingua Abaja, where he and his son Guadalupe opened a
large mercantile business. Buttrill hired James L. Sublett of
Sweetwater to grow alfalfa. Sublett may have been the first man to
use mechanized farming techniques in the Big Bend region. He
installed the area's first pump irrigation system and brought the
first wheat-threshing machine into the valley. By February 1916 he
had become Buttrill's partner.
In 1918, however, Buttrill sold
out and established a new farm two miles upriver from Castolon in
partnership with a German-born architect from Detroit named Albert W.
Dorgan. They bought a piece of property from brothers Tom and Charlie
Metcalf. This spread was known as the Steele Ranch, after prospector
L. V. Steele, who inherited it through his marriage to the daughter
of a prominent Mexican rancher. Sublett built himself a house atop a
small hill, and Dorgan moved about a half mile upriver. They
developed an extensive irrigation system along the floodplain, and
Sublett converted the old Metcalf house into a store, managed by his
son-in-law, Fred Spann.
In 1919 the federal government
leased four acres near Castolon, intending to construct permanent
quarters for a cavalry troop. Camp Santa Helena, as the installation
was called, was completed in 1920 but never used. Also in 1919 Wayne
Cartledge, whose father was a prominent Austin lawyer and partner of
Terlingua mining baron Howard E. Perry, bought the old
Sublett-Buttrill place. Cartledge, who had been manager of the Chisos
Mining Company store in Terlingua, was as ambitious as Sublett. He
set up a partnership called La Harmonía with Perry, opened a
new, larger trading post, and in 1921 began commercial cotton farming
in the area. At first La Harmonía shipped its cotton to
Houston for ginning, but in the spring of 1923 Cartledge bought a
cotton gin that became operational in October of that year.
In 1924 he brought in a former
shipbuilder named Richard W. Derrick to get the gin working more
efficiently. Derrick trained Alvino Ybarra, a Mexican immigrant, to
keep the gin running and in 1926 became the first Castolon
postmaster. The establishment of the post office also marked the
change of the community's name to Castolon, derived from the nearby
Cerro Castellan; there was already another post office in Texas
called Santa Helena. Cartledge's gin produced 150 to 200 bales of
cotton each season, marketed in El Paso and Houston, and between 1923
and 1942 ginned more than 2,000 bales. Though the cotton operation
never became a major financial success, it was a steady source of
local employment for decades.
Cartledge also introduced fruit
trees, hogs, turkeys, and bees to Castolon's agricultural repertoire.
He served as middleman for Mexican trappers who supplied him with
fox, beaver, wolf, and bobcat fur, and as a wholesale distributor for
local producers of candelilla wax. In 1921 the army allowed Cartledge
to move his store into the abandoned barracks at Camp Santa Helena.
He and his employees lived in the other buildings. In January 1925
the War Department offered for sale all its abandoned military
installations along the Rio Grande, including Camp Santa Helena.
Cartledge and Perry bought the nine buildings for $1,280 in April
1926. Cartledge moved the headquarters of La Harmonía into the
abandoned military camp.
Unfortunately, after 1927 the
Castolon cotton industry began to decline. In that year the United
States Immigration Service began strictly enforcing immigration laws,
a move that interfered with the ready supply of cheap labor from
across the Rio Grande. Many Mexican families left Castolon to avoid
deportation. Within ten years Perry began to accuse Cartledge of
mismanagement, and in 1940 Cartledge dissolved the partnership. In
1942 La Harmonía ceased cotton farming, and Cartledge turned
over the management of the Castolon store to his son.
After the establishment of Big
Bend National Park in 1944, Castolon's days were numbered. The
estimated population declined from twenty-five in the late 1930s to
just three by the early 1960s. The post office closed in 1954, and
three years later Cartledge finally signed the deed transferring his
holdings at Castolon to the National Park Service, though he retained
the right to operate the store for three more years. By the mid-1980s
the only residents of Castolon were National Park Service employees,
although the Castolon store was still open under NPS management and
remained a tourist attraction. In 2000 the population was eight.
TXGenWeb Project USGenWeb Project
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