Boracho	Kent	Old Christian Place	Pine Springs
Cornudus	Levinson	Ort	Van Horn
Grisham Pumping Station	Lobo	Pezuna del Caballo

Boracho

Boracho, Texas was on U.S. Highway 80 and the Texas and Pacific Railway ten miles west of Kent and twenty-six miles east of Van Horn in south central Culberson County. It was apparently founded around the time that the railroad was built through the area in the early 1880s. Its name is probably a misspelling of borracho, Spanish for "drunk." One source says the town got its name during the construction of the railroad, when the crew for the Texas and Pacific, building west through Culberson County, was outpacing the competing Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio crew, which was building east from Hudspeth County. The GH and SA crew donated several wagonloads of whiskey to their rivals and took the lead while the T and P crew was sleeping off the booze. Another source, however, says that the name is Spanish for "violet-covered" and is derived from the name of nearby Boracho Peak in Jeff Davis County. A local post office operated from 1908 until 1912 with Mary E. Glenn as postmistress. Maps of the area from the mid-1950s showed just one dwelling at the site. By 1970 a cemetery was all that remained there.

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Kent

There is a post office, gas station, and general store. Also a railroad. Kent is located 36 miles east of Van Horn, Texas, on Interstate 10, U. S. Highway 118, Farm Road 2424, the Missouri Pacific railroad, and near the Jeff Davis and Reeves county lines in southeastern Culberson County. The ranching community was first known as Antelope because of the many animals in the area. The Texas and Pacific railroad laid its tracks through the community in 1881. Kent was a siding or section house on the railroad, as were Boracho, Plateau, and Wild Horse that were located beside the tracks between Kent and Van Horn. The railroad probably gave Kent its name. In 1892, when the area of Culberson County was yet apart of El Paso County, the first post office was granted but never opened at Kent, Texas. A second post office was authorized and opened in 1893 and John Charles Rickli became postmaster. By 1896 two livestock businesses operated in the community. In 1911Culberson County was formed from El Paso County and Kent, Texas, came under the government of the new county when it was organized in 1912. In 1914 the settlement had a general store, four cattle breeders, and a population of 25. From 1924 and continuing into the 1960s, population was reportedly 50. The post office closed in 1960 and Kent School ended its sessions in 1961. Population in the late 1960s was given as 65 and the community was served by four businesses. Population declined to 60 in the mid-1970s and remained there throughout the 1990s. In 1998 the number of businesses was eight.

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Pine Springs

PINE SPRINGS, TEXAS (Culberson County). Pine Springs is on U.S. Highway 62/180 fifty-nine miles north of Van Horn and three miles southeast of Guadalupe Peak in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in northwestern Culberson County. The site was known to nineteenth-century travelers crossing Guadalupe Pass; among those who camped there were Lt. Francis Theodore Bryan and Capt. Randolph Barnes Marcy in 1849, John Russell Bartlettqv in 1850, and Capt. John Pope in 1854. In 1858 the Butterfield Overland Mail built a stage station, called the Pinery, at the site. When the first westbound mailarrived on September 28, 1858, only a palisade corral had been built, and station-keeper Henry Ramstein and his assistants were still living intents. The Pinery was completed in November 1858 but was abandoned in August 1859, when the mail route was shifted to the south to take advantage of the protection afforded by forts Stockton and Davis. In 1870 troops from Fort Quitman under Maj. Albert Morrow rendezvoused at the site with reinforcements from forts Stockton and Davis to prepare for scouting expeditions against the Mescalero Apaches in the Guadalupes. The troops marched up into McKittrick Canyon and promptly became lost, although they did stumble onto one Mescalero village, which they enthusiastically pillaged. In the mid-1880s,after the Mescaleros had finally been eliminated as a threat, soldiers, freighters, and other transients still used the Pinery for shelter. By 1907 rancher Walter Glover had bought the land on which the Pinery stood and had settled in the area. Ten years later he brought his bride, Bertha, to Pine Springs. In 1928, when U.S. Highway 62 was opened, they built the Pine Springs Cafe, soon a stopping place for automobile travelers between El Paso and Carlsbad, New Mexico, which Bertha Glover ran until her death in 1982. She also became the postmistress when a post office was established in 1942, at which time the population of Pine Springs was estimated at fifty; the post office closed the next year. The estimated population grew to seventy in the mid-1940s, when three businesses were in operation, but by the mid-1960s had fallen to ten. Upon the establishment of Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which opened to the public in 1972, the estimated population rose to twenty. In 1990 the community's population was still reported as twenty. Pine Springs claims to be the windiest town in Texas. Each year between February and April the town is buffeted by winds averaging fifty to eighty miles an hour and sometimes reaching 105 miles an hour.

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Cornudus

CORNUDAS, TEXAS. Cornudas is at the intersection of Farm Road 2317 and U.S. Highway 62/180, forty-two miles northwest of Sierra Blanca in north central Hudspeth County. It was named for the Cornudas Mountains, fourteen miles to the north. The settlement was founded by 1938, when Mrs. Willie Tinnin was appointed postmistress of a local post office that closed within a year. At that time the community served several cattle ranches, and there was a Standard Oil pumping station about six miles south. Cornudas continued to be shown on maps of the area through the mid-1980s, at which time it had several businesses and scattered dwellings. A church and a school were near the pumping station.

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Van Horn, Texas

VAN HORN, TEXAS. Van Horn, the county seat of Culberson County, is at the intersection of U.S. highways 80 and 90 and State Highway 54, on the Missouri Pacific Railroad thirty-six miles west of Kent in southwestern Culberson County. The Van Horn Wells were reportedly discovered twelve miles south of the future townsite by Maj. Jefferson Van Horne who became commander at Fort Bliss in El Paso in 1849, and were well known to nineteenth century travelers. The coaches of the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Route passed through the area in the late 1850s and early 1860s, when Lt. James Judson Van Horn no relation to Major Van Horne, was in command of an army garrison at Van Horn Wells. Lieutenant Van Horn's command lasted only two years, from 1859 to 1861, when Confederate forces seized the wells and took him prisoner, but his fame was ensured twenty years later when a town was founded a few miles north and named after him. The town grew up on the Texas and Pacific Railway, which built through the area in 1881. Among the earliest settlers in the area were railroad agent Jack Veats, Thomas Owen or Owens, Ed Hamm, and the families of A. A. (Gus) Cox, J. H. Beach, and Robert K. (Bob) Wylie;qv the latter two gave their names to nearby mountain ranges. Owen had discovered the Hazel Mine, ten miles northwest of the site of future Van Horn in 1856 but was forced to abandon his claim temporarily due to the Civil War and the ever-present threat of the Mescalero Apaches, who swept down from the Guadalupe and Sierra Diablo Mountains to the north through the 1870s. He returned to Van Horn and later became a justice of the peace. The first person to die in Van Horn was an infant child of the Beach family, in 1881, whereupon Beach gave a plat of land west of town for use as a cemetery. According to local legend, the first adult to die was rancher Bill Goynes, and his passing was not without irony. In tribute to Van Horn's climate, Goynes supposedly suggested the motto, "This Town Is So Healthy We Had to Shoot a Man to Start a Cemetery," which later hung in the lobby of the Clark Hotel. Shortly thereafter Goynes was shot dead by his brother-in-law in a feud over a watering hole, thereby becoming the first man buried in the Van Horn cemetery.
In 1883 the Texas and Pacific put down wells, which supplied the town for the next twenty-six years. The first store in Van Horn was built in 1886 by W. D. Johnson and a Mr. Hyler; a post office was established in the same year with P. H. Manuss as postmaster. The first school in Van Horn was established in 1887, when Mrs. C. M. Cox taught seven pupils in her home; the first schoolhouse was built in 1893. By 1890 an estimated 450 people were living in the area, and the town had twelve businesses, including a general store, a hotel, a real estate office, a blacksmith, and a lawyer. Two years later, however, the population of the town itself was estimated at only thirty; that year saw the arrival of the family of W. A. King, the section foreman for the railroad. The section house was the largest building in Van Horn, and before the town's first hotel was built the Kings served meals and took boarders. The population had climbed to an estimated seventy by 1896, but thesort of violence that produced the grimly humorous fate of Bill Goynes persisted. In 1896 R. L. Hall, the owner of the nearby D Ranch, moved to Van Horn, opened the Van Horn Trading Company, and became postmaster. Four years later he was murdered by Red Sealy.
The town continued to grow in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1899 the first Old Settlers' Reunion was held; it would become Van Horn's biggest event, held annually on August 28 and featuring rodeo events, dancing, and a barbecue. In 1910 Robert Espy set the world record for roping and tying a goat (eleven seconds), and Governor William P. Hobby himself attended the 1919 celebration. In 1901contractor John E. Cox, the son of Gus Cox, built the Cox Building. In 1905 the office building was expanded to house a dance hall, opera house, community center, pool hall, and saloon. From 1911 to 1914, after Culberson County was organized but before a county court-house had been built, the building also housed the county government. In 1918 it was converted to a hotel, and in 1929 a cafe was added. Today the Clark Hotel, as it came to be known, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A Methodist congregation was organized in 1907, and two years later John Cox built the first church of cement blocks. In 1909 Cox also built the town's second schoolhouse and its first electrical plant, and he also dug Van Horn's first city water well. The Van Horn State Bank opened on August 16 of the same year.
By 1911, when the county was organized, Van Horn was the logical choice to become the county seat. The first county election was held on April 18, 1911, but not until three years later did the county governmenthave its own building. In May 1912 the Culberson County commissioners awarded a contract for construction of a county courthouse to E. E. Churchill of Fort Worth. Clad in locally-quarried sandstone and designed in a vaguely Italian Renaissance style, the courthouse was completed in 1914, at a total cost of $44,335, and immediately became the political and social center of Culberson County life. The balcony over the main entrance, at the rear of the courtroom, provided an ideal place for the residents of Van Horn to watch one another and await their principal daily excitement, the arrival of the afternoon train. The courthouse, which received a medallion from theTexas Historical Commissionqv in 1962, was used until 1965. By 1914, when the new courthouse was completed, Van Horn's population was estimated at 500, and the town had a bank, two newspapers, six cattle breeders, two general stores, a hotel, a telephone company, an ice and feed store, a drugstore, a blacksmith, and a meat market. Despite such signs of growth and sophistication, however, Van Horn could still be a wild place. In 1914 John Marine was appointed the second sheriff of Culberson County, serving out the unexpired term of his predecessor, J. H. Feeley, who had been killed in a gunfight.
In 1927 the estimated population had grown to 800, and in the late 1930s it had reached 1,600. By that time, thanks to the increasing popularity of automobile travel, the completion of U.S. Highway 80, and Van Horn's proximity to the Guadalupe Mountains, sixty miles to the north, the Big Bend, and Carlsbad Caverns, tourism had assumed an increasingly prominent role in the local economy. The railroad arranged day trips by bus to Carlsbad Caverns, newspaper stories trumpeted the excellent hunting (antelope, deer, quail, mountain lion, and bear) in the area, and the town boasted a number of hotels and tourist camps. Van Horn was incorporated on September 1, 1945. By the late 1940s the town had sixty businesses and an estimated population of 2,070. The population had grown to 2,671 in the late 1980s. With the completion of Interstate Highway 10, the establishment of the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, some 10,000 vehicles passed through Van Horn every day. In the late 1980s the town had fifteen motels, seven of which were owned by East Indians.