Longfellow

Longfellow is an abandoned railroad station on the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad in extreme southern Pecos County. The community site is on U.S. Highway 90 sixteen miles west of Sanderson. The area was first settled before the Civil War by Mexican ranchers who grazed their livestock on both sides of the Rio Grande. Longfellow was started around 1881 as the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway built through the area. The community was named by the railroad for the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It became a livestock shipping point for a wide area and soon had a railroad depot and telegraph office, as well as extensive facilities for supplying water to locomotives passing through. Once when workmen were drilling for water, they unexpectedly struck a vein of silver ore. The railroad company also operated a ballast quarry near the station. In 1890 a post office was established in Longfellow, and the town became headquarters for the Longfellow Ranch. By the mid-twentieth century improved highway transportation caused Longfellow to lose much of its trade to nearby Sanderson and other larger towns. By 1933 the post office had been discontinued. The railroad closed its freight and telegraph office in 1944, when diesel engines came into use, and the water column and well facilities were abandoned in 1954. By the mid-1980s only the ranch headquarters and the ruins of some of the old railroad buildings remained.