It started with a rancher picking up a rock. In 1880 John Spencer, who ran cattle and hauled freight to Fort Davis, found ore in the Chinati Mountains that looked like silver. It was.
What grew out of that is one of the more productive silver districts in Texas. From 1883 to 1942 the mines at Shafter produced more than 32.6 million ounces of silver, employed between three and four hundred people at a time, and paid the largest tax assessments in Presidio County. The town sat along a bend of Cibolo Creek about eighteen miles north of Presidio, and at its height around 1940 it held as many as four thousand people, with a post office, a school, two saloons and a dance hall.
It closed in 1942, and the reasons are the ordinary ones rather than anything dramatic: labour trouble, ore grading lower as the good rock ran out, reserves drawing down, and water flooding the workings. Every mining district ends this way eventually. Shafter simply ended in one year.
By 1943 the population was down to about 1,500. Today roughly sixty people live there, which makes it a ghost town in the accurate sense rather than the empty one: it is quiet, not abandoned, and people live in it.
The adobe ruins and the cemetery are the draw, along with a landscape that is genuinely remote. Treat the standing buildings and the old workings as private property and dangerous ground respectively, because both are true, and take water: this is the Chihuahuan desert and Presidio regularly records the hottest temperature in the United States.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
