Comstock-Ozona Stage Stand, Site of

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, most folks blowing through Crockett County today wouldn't slow down long enough to notice a scatter of flagstone ruins out here in the brush. But those stones have a story, and it starts before sunup.

We're talking about the Comstock-Ozona Stage Stand, first stop on the passenger and mail line connecting Ozona with the Southern Pacific railhead down at Comstock, eighty miles distant. Eighty miles. Out here.

In the early nineteen hundreds. Let that settle. The stage would roll out of Ozona at five in the morning, and right around eight-thirty it would come pulling in here, horses blowing, dust trailing behind it like a long brown ghost.

And when it did, the agent was ready. Fresh horses already in harness, because the next twenty-mile run wasn't going to wait on anybody. That's how this line worked.

No dawdling. You swap the horses and you go. Now, the agent who kept this stand, he didn't live in some comfortable ranch house.

His family lived in a tent. A tent with a flagstone floor, which, when you think about it, is either the most practical thing you've ever heard or the most heartbreaking, depending on the morning. Out beyond that tent stood rock pens, one for a pig, one for a cow, and most likely a corral somewhere for the horses that made the whole operation run.

That's it. That was the stand. Flagstone, canvas, livestock, and commitment.

It all kept going until about nineteen fourteen, when the automobile came along and quietly ended the era of the stage line the way progress tends to do, without much ceremony and without asking permission. The stage stopped running. The tent came down.

The horses moved on. But here's the thing about this place, and I think it's worth sayin slow. The wagon ruts are still visible.

After everything, after more than half a century of wind and rain and indifference, the earth out here still holds the shape of those wheels. Some stories don't need a monument. They just need the ground to remember.

What the marker says

Flagstone ruins nearby mark site of early 1900's stage stand, first stop on passenger and mail line connecting Ozona with Southern Pacific railhead at Comstock--80 miles distant. When stage pulled in about 8:30 A.M. (having left Ozona at 5:00) agent had fresh horses in harness for next 20-mile run. Agent's family lived in tent with a flagstone floor. Other structures here were rock pens for a pig and cow and probably a corral for horses. Automobile replaced stage about 1914, but wagon ruts are still visible.