The Barton House was a landmark on the Chisholm cattle-drive Trail, the Central National Road (AKA the Old Preston/Old Military Road), and early stage roads (that became the Dallas-San Antonio Road). All of these early transportation, settlement commercial, and military routes passed through Salado, Texas on the way to points north or south.
A state historic marker in front of the Wellborn Barton House reads as follows:
"HOME OF WELLBORN BARTON
1821 . . . 1883
Pioneer physician of this region. For many years a trustee of Salado College, built 1866. (John Hendrickson, Contractor)
Old Military Road and Chisholm Cattle Trail passed here.
Erected by the State of Texas
1936"
From the Texas Historical Commission, an excellent pamphlet on the Chisholm Trail through Texas: (
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"In the decades following the Civil War, more than 6 million cattle—up to 10 million by some accounts—were herded out of Texas in one of the greatest migrations of animals ever known. These 19th-century cattle drives laid the foundation for Texas’ wildly successful cattle industry and helped elevate the state out of post-Civil War despair and poverty. . . .
Texas Longhorns
The hardy breed of livestock known as the Texas longhorn descended from Spanish Andalusian cattle brought over by early-16th-century explorers, missionaries, and ranchers. . . . After the Texas Revolution and the change in governmental control, many cattle were left to roam free in sparsely populated ranch land. Wild cattle were widespread throughout Texas, and were considered game, much like deer and buffalo. Abundant food and water and little human contact allowed the longhorn breed to adapt to the land, and the cattle population grew into the millions.
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As early as the 1840s, cattlemen searched out profitable markets for longhorns, but options were few. . . . Ultimately, the solution for Texas cattlemen rested directly north, where railroads snaking back to meat packing centers in the east were beginning to be established. . . . In 1867, an Illinois livestock dealer named Joseph G. McCoy, working with the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, established a cattle shipping terminal in Abilene, Kansas. . . . He was the first to exploit the expanding railroads to move cattle to distant markets. To reach McCoy’s new shipping yard, cattle drivers used a route blazed by trader Jesse Chisholm, which extended from Wichita, Kansas, across the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma) to the Red River. . . .
. . .
In Texas, there was no single route to the destination points in Central Kansas, but the various starting points and tributary routes typically entered a main cattle drive stream that surged north toward Austin, Waco, and Fort Worth before crossing the Red River at Spanish Fort or Red River Station.
. . .
A cattle drive across a state as big as Texas must have seemed like an eternity to the men and women who made the journey.Although some of the following communities did not exist during the Chisholm Trail era, cowboys drove their herds through the vicinity, and ranching and cattle driving remain part of the regional heritage.
While it is impossible to list all the towns that played a role in the Chisholm Trail, these destinations offer today’s visitors a chance to experience and explore the history of the trail.
The guide is organized from roughly south to north, the direction of the cattle drives, beginning in the region where most of the cattle were gathered. The cities in this guide are organized according to the heritage regions below, part of the Texas Historical Commission’s nationally award-winning tourism
initiative, the Texas Heritage Trails Program. There is no recommended sequence in which to visit the sites; city numbers on the regional maps follow the order in which they appear in the guide. . . .
Stop No. 30
Salado
The limestone springs and abundant fish in Salado made the area a popular site for American Indians, explorers, settlers, and cattle drovers. Herds pushed through the heart of town and crossed Salado Creek at the springs near the present city bridge. The nearby Stagecoach Inn was founded in 1861 as the Shady Villa Hotel, and is said to have counted among its guests famous cattleman Shanghai Pearce, as well as Generals
George Custer and Robert E. Lee. Nearby, the Chisholm Trail passed by the 1866 home of pioneer and area physician Wellborn Barton. Also a National Register-listed property, it now houses a restaurant."
More on the Central National Road, also known as Preston Road and also the Old Military Road, can be found here, in the Handbook of Texas: (
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"CENTRAL NATIONAL ROAD. The Central National Road of the Republic of Texas was planned by the Texas Congress, which, on February 5, 1844, established a five-man commission to select a right-of-way, see that it was cleared, and supervise the building of necessary bridges. . . .The road was to begin on the bank of the Trinity River not more than fifteen miles below the bank of the Elm Fork in Dallas County and run to the south bank of the Red River in the northwest corner of Red River County, opposite the mouth of the Kiamachi River.
. . . At its southern terminus it connected with the road opened in 1840 between Austin and Preston Bend on the Red River, in effect making an international highway between St. Louis and San Antonio. The international role that Congress may have visualized for the road was never fulfilled, however, because of population shifts that came with the westward movement of the frontier and the subsequent development of new towns and increased importance of other routes."
Several early stage routes passed through Salado. The Waco-Austin Stage road eventually expanded and extended from Dallas to San Antonio. From the book Camino Del Norte: How a Series of Watering Holes, Fords, and Dirt Trails Evolved into I-35 in Texas, by Howard J. Erlichman: (
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""[page 97] As with the case with Spain’s Camino’s Reales, genuine road building in Texas was driven by military need. Roads were surveyed or built when deemed necessary to supply the continuing westward movement of US military forts (and tag-along businesses) and to provide regular communications by mail and eventually telegraph. San Antonio, Austin, and Waco emerged as important mail depots for the Western frontier. Military mail service was regular but slow; a civilian horseback rider required roughly 10 days travel between San Antonio and Fort Brown. In 1850 a mail route between San Antonio and El Paso took either thirty days by horseback or three months by wagon.
Otherwise, mail was carried by dedicated stagecoach lines. I. T. Brown and Lyman Tarbox of Houston had revived biweekly stage line between Austin and Houston in 1845, via Washington, La Grange, and Bastrop. The twenty dollar fare included up to thirty pounds of luggage, and the trip took around three and a half days. In August 1847, once the military (Preston) Road was in operation, Brown and Tarbox won the first annual contract for thousand dollars to operate a weekly, two horse coach service between Austin and San Antonio.
. . . .
North of Austin, the company Belton, Berney, & Blair operated a weekly mail and stage service between Austin and Waco along the Preston Road, until replaced by Sawyer and Compton in 1857. Sawyer and Compton continued to [page 98] run a daily service between the two towns until the Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1881. An alternate day service between San Antonio and Waco began in 1861. One stop of note was the Shady Villa (the current Stagecoach) Inn insulative, built in eighteen fifty-two on the site visited by Indians for centuries, by Cook’s military Road expedition, and later by Chisholm Trail drivers. Salado served local stages and the Western stage companies piece of the great Northern line tween Memphis (via Little Rock) and San Antonio. By September 1858, Western was stopping at San Antonio, new Braunfels, San Marcus, and Austin, with connections to Waco in Dallas. When weekly mail service was extended to Laredo in eighteen sixty-one, Western and other stages were rolling along most of the future route of I-35. . . ."