Fort Stockton's old Fort Cemetery holds the earthly remains of 2 men responsible for most of turmoil in Fort Stockton, and its reputation for lawlessness in the 1890s.
When the Old Spanish Trail was first routed through Fort Stockton in the 19 twenties, Sheriff A. J. Royal and his reign of terror would be well within living memory of those who had lived through it. Those who had brought it to an end may even have been watching OST travelers stop by his grave which reads, shockingly, as follows:
A. J. ROYAL
Born
Nov. 25, 1855
Assassinated
Nov. 21, 1894
Sleep husband dear and take thy rest.
God called the home; He thought it best.
It was hard indeed to part with thee.
But Christ's strong arm supporteth me.
Gone but not forgotten."
The full story can be found on the Legends of America website: (
visit link)
The story is so involved and so lurid that it is impossible to summarize it here and do the tale justice. Sheriff Royal was one of the most hated men ever to set foot in Fort Stockton, and not because he was a law-and-order, clean-up-the-lawless-toewn kimd of Sheriff. Quite the opposite: He was a violent and vindictive man who actively fomented strife and chaos in the city, and making enemies of powerful men, who he had imprisoned and tied in charges that the sheriff himself had trumped up.
Sheriff Royal (who also operated a bar) was fond of making drunken public pronouncements of who the next man he was looking forward to killing was. Many of these named men were advised by the Texas Rangers to arm themselves at all times. Many of these named targets were from wealthy or powerful families in Fort Stockton.
Amid escalating tensions, the Texas Rangers were called in, but even the Texas Rangers could only respond to the drama; they could not stamp it out. It is therefore no surprise that the sheriff was assassinated while sitting at his desk in the County Courthouse. It is said in Fort Stockton that nine of the city's leading citizens (many who had been falsely accused of crimes or jailed unjustly by the sheriff) met and decided that the sheriff had to die. They drew lots to determine who would be the man to fire the fatal shot.
No one was ever identified as the shooter.
No one ever stood trial for the murder of Sheriff Royal.
Even today, 120 years after he died, "who shot the sheriff" is a favorite Fort Stockton unsolved mystery and source of speculation.
Sheriff Royal and his deputy, Barney Riggs, are buried close together in this cemetery.
With the American cultural taste for lurid stories, the old Fort Cemetery and Sheriff Royal's grave would've been an irresistible lure for tourists along the Old Spanish Trail, as it is even today.
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).