The OST Loop Route into Fort Stockton came in from the east along E Dickinson Boulevard, dipped southwest via N Alamo Street to N Spring Street to downtown Fort Stockton, then turned back towards the northwest on Callaghan Street to Railroad Avenue before heading north to rejoin W Dickinson Blvd and head west out of town.
It's hard now to remember the times when restaurants along the highway would be few and far between, and most travelers would prefer to make sandwiches at home to eat on the trip.
For those travelers, the expansive grass and picnic tables at the Pecos County Courthouse grounds in an otherwise extremely dusty West Texas town would have been a favorite picnicking spot, located on the Old Spanish Trail through downtown Fort Stockton. Another amenity scarce on the early auto routes: cold water fountains and air-conditioned clean bathrooms - also on offer inside the courthouse. Other reasons to stop here: plenty of room to stretch and get out of the car for a while, memorials to World War I and World War II, picnic tables, a gazebo, and the 0 stone, an important surveying benchmark and the point of origin for all land surveys in West Texas.
The Pecos County Courthouse was built in 1883 and remodeled in 1912. By the time the Old Spanish Trail arrived in the 1920s, Fort Stockton had made the transition from rough-and-tumble frontier town to military post, to ranching center.
In the 1920s, Fort Stockton had three US highways converging just east of its busy downtown: The US 290, the US 67, and the US 285. (Source: Old Highway Maps section of (
visit link) ). These early auto routes were more about local economic development and tourism than about getting from point A to point B on a straight line. Travelers on these auto routes always went through the downtowns of the cities that (under the early system) paid to route the highway through their community. Later when the federal highway system came into existence, these early auto routes were assigned US Highway numbers, but the roads to the downtowns, many of which is already been improved, remained.
Travelers on the OST would have passed by this very spot as they visited Fort Stockton on the OST.
The history of the Old Spanish Trail is as varied as the areas it crosses on its journey from Jacksonville FL to San Diego CA. In Texas, the OST has had many routes, but by 1921 a predominantly southern route from Orange to San Antonio to El Paso had been formalized. Source: The Development of Highways in Texas:
A Historic Context of the Bankhead Highway and Other Historic Named Highways, but the Texas Historical Commission
(
visit link)
"The Old Spanish Trail largely overlapped with the “Southern National Highway,” as the route was named by the Texas Highway Commission in 1917. At that time, the agency formally incorporated the roadway as SH 3 in the new state highway system. (See Figure 183.) However, the route marked by the Old Spanish Trail Association included a wideranging variety of alignments other than SH 3; the most notable was the SH 27 alignments travelling through Kerrville, Sonora, and Junction en route to Fort Stockton.
Regardless of the name or designation used, the route quickly assumed a leading role in the state’s emerging highway system, in part, because it travelled to not only some of the state’s most important nodes of military installations (San Antonio) and industrial centers (the oil refineries in Houston and the Gold Triangle areas of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange), but also some of the state’s best known tourist destinations, parks, and recreational centers, such as the Alamo and Balmorrhea State Park."
By 1926, when the US Federal Highway System converted the old names Auto Tour Routes into a numbered system of US Highways, the OST was well established. At this time, parts of the OST in Texas were co-designated US 90, US 90Alt, US 87, US 80 and US 290.
The OST in Fort Stockton was part of the US 290 alignment that terminated northwest of Balmorhea at US 80 (The Bankhead Highway).