Some ghost town residents wonder if the plans will spur growth
SHAFTER — Billionaire John Poindexter, who owns the Cibolo Creek Ranch resort south of Marfa, has recently purchased several Shafter Ghost Town properties, and has made an offer to restore the historic church at the gateway to the town. Pondexter’s goal is to rehab the properties and eventually let visitors explore the history of the area with exhibits on display in the old structures.
Shafter residents — about 25 — have mixed feelings about the idea, but most seem excited about the coming addition of a small restaurant and shop, since they must drive 19 miles to Presidio for the closest supplies. “We’re taking it step by step,” said Cibolo Creek Ranch Manager Tom Davis as he led The Big Bend Sentinel on a tour of some of the renovations. “The idea is to first restore [properties] then look at what use they may be the best.”
Shafter, 40 miles south of Marfa on Highway 67, has seen its ups and downs in population and in viable housing for decades, with dozens of adobe buildings crumbling due to neglect and abandonment. The silver mining town was bustling through the early 1900s when the mine on the west side of Highway 67 was in operation. Some high-point estimates put the population near 1,500, and at various points the town boasted a school, several taverns, a jail, a post office and the centerpiece of the community — the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Mission Church built in 1890.
As silver prices fell, the mine was shut down numerous times through the 1920s and 1930s before closing again in 1942, and the town’s residents left in droves. Now, even a highway department sign declares it a ghost town.
Poindexter announced a version of these plans in 2022 with a press release announcing his intent to buy the silver mine and have his nonprofit Tidewater & Big Bend Foundation turn the area and the town across the highway into a “living history” destination with museums and live actors depicting history and culture. However, the Canadian company that owns the now defunct silver mine declined his offer.
That seemed to put a wrench in Poindexter’s plans, but this fall workers and bulldozers arrived to kick off the restoration of the central core of the old town.
Tidewater & Big Bend Foundation Secretary Henry Thompson said that the living history vision is still in the mix but that the immediate focus is on restoration. How to interpret the history and convey it to visitors will be determined later. “Step one is to preserve and rehabilitate the structures to what they would have looked like around 1900 or so in Shafter’s heyday,” he said. “And then we will have some exhibits, but we’ll also probably have some ability to house visitors overnight. Kind of the same as Colonial Williamsburg, where you can actually stay in town and then some of the structures will just be museum visiting.”
Notable buildings recently purchased by Poindexter’s foundation include the former Howell Package Store — a rock building with a compound and back house surrounded by rock walls on the creek — a large house next door and a former gas station situated across from the church on the highway. The gas station was the “Silver Mine Store” operated by Harold and Mollie Biediger in the 1970s, but Davis said it served a variety of uses through the years.
“The idea is to make it a small restaurant, including beer and wine,” he said. “A place for people to stop and enjoy the town.” Crews demolished a studio addition built by the last residents and stripped the adobe plaster to its original finish — temporarily revealing the Harold and Mollie Biediger signage before it was painted over. Similar work has been done on other buildings to try and get them back to their original design and construction.
Other visible signs of the new work include clearing vegetation around the church — leaving only small mesquite trees — as well as clearing of vegetation by and behind the Howell store all the way to Cibolo Creek. The creek is a defining feature of Shafter, which, although dry now because of drought, has flowed year-round at times when its spring is fed by monsoon rains soaking into the aquifer, which also feeds lines of towering cottonwood trees along the creek’s banks.
Still uncertain is what, if anything, to do about many of the abandoned structures that aren’t feasible to restore but that still are near collapse throughout the center of town, Thompson said. Some of the adobes lend to keeping the spirit of a ghost town, while empty trailer homes, maybe not, he said.
Thompson said they are still negotiating with the El Paso Catholic Church Diocese on what to do with the church. “We’ve talked to them. What we’re hoping for is some kind of cooperative deal where we can fund the restoration of the church, and it would just stay a church,” he said. “The steeple needs a lot of work, and we want to redo that and put on a historical steeple, because I think it changed at some point in the last 20 or 30 years.” The church, which still offers Mass on the third Sunday of each month, would likely remain open to visitors and those stopping in to pray, he said.
The church also serves as a community center of sorts for the town to hold meetings on issues like its water supply. Shafter, which still gets its water from a well owned by the mine, recently formed a water supply corporation to coordinate with Presidio County on state grants for a possible new well and water system — which would eliminate the uncertainty of depending on a well that might be sold to a new owner in the future, leaving the town without water. Shafter resident and water board president David Long said overall, he feels Poindexter’s plans are positive. “I think it’s great that he’s preserving these buildings,” he said.
However, Long said the combination of the preservation efforts and a dependable water supply might spur more people to move to Shafter. “This is a wakeup call for sure, for people to start considering what’s going to happen to the town,” he said. “Once we get a dependable, good water system in here, the place is going to boom.”
Shafter residents also have long lived under uncertainty on whether the silver mine will operate again, which would bring dozens of employees to the area. (It did briefly from 2008-2012 before closing again with falling silver prices.) Although the mine owner — Aurcana of Vancouver — is nearly bankrupt and failed to close on a potential buyer in May, rising silver prices in the past year may make the sale more viable.
Shafter resident Randall Cater wrote in an editorial in this edition of The Sentinel that he agreed that the preservation efforts are a sign of things to come, the end of the ghost town. “Here we were in one of the most beautiful places in the Big Bend, not 300 yards off a good highway, and we had it all to ourselves. We knew it was too good to last,” he wrote.
Longtime Shafter resident and former Presidio County Judge Monroe Elms said he’s all for progress, but worries that increasing values on restored buildings could lead to a rise in his property taxes. Elms said the history of the area is so rich, however, that it needs to be highlighted. Some of that history is on display in a small concrete-block museum next to the town’s cemetery, a vast array of graves, most all marked only by piles of stones and white crosses. They provide an enchanting picture against the backdrop of the towering Tres Hermanas and El Corazon Mountains, but very few visitors stop to see them.
Elms said he would like to see more done to show just how special Shafter has been in the county’s history — everything from the area’s early inhabitants and the foundation of ranching by Milton Faver in the late 1800s to a vast migration of refugees fleeing during the Mexican Revolution and camping in Shafter before heading to Marfa.
“Pershing used to sleep here. Patton used to sleep here,” Elms said, referring to famous U.S. military officers from World War I and II serving in the area in the early 1900s. “It’s pretty cool, but nobody brings it up to talk about it. We ought to do that.”