Site of Chihuahua Road -- US90 at Sycamore Creek, E of Del Rio TX
N 29° 23.458 W 100° 42.691
14R E 333916 N 3252520
The state historic marker along the route of the old Chihuahua road, on westbound US 90 at Sycamore Creek east of Del Rio
Waymark Code: WMPNAM
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 09/25/2015
Views: 1
This historic marker is located on the north side of the westbound US 90 at a roadside pullout just west of Sycamore Creek, which forms the boundary between Kinney and Val Verde counties.
This marker is very new, so we think it is a replacement marker for the original 1968 marker. he marker reads as follows:
"SITE OF CHIHUAHUA ROAD
In the 19th Century, a life line that connected Chihuahua, Mexico, with the Texas port of Indianola. Opened to exploit rich trade in Mexican silver and gold, the road eventually carried every type of goods (including, in 1860, 27 camels), adventurers, settlers, soldiers, and "forty-niners" bound for the California gold rush. All sorts of vehicles used the Chihuahua Road: stagecoaches, wagons, ox-carts, and traveling ambulances, which were light carriages with 4-foot wheels. Not until the railroad came to San Antonio, 1877, did this road lose its commercial importance. (1968)
Marker is property of the state of Texas"
More on the Chihuahua road can be found here at the Indianola Texas website: (
visit link)
"Indianola and the Chihuahua Road
by Nelson Marek
Indianola's birth was the direct result of calamitous difficulties encountered by early immigrants from Germany who were brought to the shores of the Republic of Texas by the Adelsverein, beginning in 1844. Her death was due to her near sea level location on Matagorda Bay and the visitation of two "once-in-a-century" hurricanes within a span of only 11 years.
During the period between 1844 and 1886, Indianola grew from a plague-infested immigrant camp to a cosmopolitan port city. At her zenith before the storm of 1875, she was second only to Galveston in the state and was regarded by that place as an annoying threat to its commercial and maritime supremacy. Wielding vast influence on the development of Western Texas, as the land west of the Colorado River was then called, Indianola left her imprint on that great region. She became the port for the Chihuahua trade, was the eastern terminus of the shortest overland route to California, was the funnel through which tens of thousands of immigrants from Germany, Switzerland and France came to Texas..to say nothing of the influx of settlers who immigrated from the southern and eastern United States to the new land of the west. Over her wharves moved the necessities and luxuries of life for the inhabitants of Western Texas, as well as the ordnance and other supplies for the chain of forts that shielded "civilized" Texas from the untamed Indian tribes. . . "