Glenn Springs

Glenn Springs was located on Glenn Draw eleven miles southeast of the Basin Ranger Station in Big Bend National Park in southern Brewster County. The spring for which the community is named was an important source of water long before the first White settlers arrived. It was used by Comanches going to and from Mexico along the Comanche Trail and may have been visited by the 1859 camel expedition under Edward L. Hartz (see CAMELS). In the latter half of the nineteenth century, while the spring was still visited regularly by Indians, the land on which it was located was bought and sold several times by speculators; at that time it was labeled Jordan Spring on maps of the area. The spring, like the draw on which it is situated, got its current name from W. J. Glenn, who surveyed the area in 1881 and later ranched in the area. In April 1903 local rancher Tom Pulliam bought it from an Alpine lawyer, and in March 1904 Pulliam sold it to Martín Solís, another local cattleman. The land remained in the Solís family until August 1914, when Martín's son Benito sold it to W. K. Ellis, who had previously operated a candelilla wax factory at McKinney Spring.

Ellis, with his partners C. D. Wood and Oscar de Montel, moved his base of operations to Glenn Springs, where they built a wax factory. They also moved the McKinney Springs post office, although they did not bother to apply for a name change. The post office closed in 1921 and was later reestablished under the name Mariscal at the Mariscal Mine. Ellis constructed several buildings, including a five-room house, and a piped water system at Glenn Springs; his partners Wood and de Montel lived at Robbers Roost, two miles west on Juniper Draw. The wax workers lived in a scattering of adobe huts or jacals that extended a half mile up the west bank of Glenn Draw.