Alpine: From Murphyville to the Heart of Big Bend Country
Near Alpine, Texas
When the Southern Pacific Railroad's tracks arrived in this wide valley in the foothills of the Davis Mountains in eighteen eighty-two, there was almost nothing here: a spring-fed creek, a few tents, and the possibility of a water source for the steam engines that needed it. The railroad called the nascent settlement Osborne after one of its section agents. The name changed the following year to Murphyville, when railroad officials negotiated with brothers named Murphy who owned the best spring in the area.
In exchange for the right to use that spring to supply their locomotives, the railroad agreed to rename the town in the Murphy family's honor. The arrangement did not last. In eighteen eighty-eight, local residents petitioned successfully to change the name to Alpine.
The word evoked a grandeur the actual landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert does not quite provide, but the Davis Mountains rising to the west and north give the valley a genuine elevation and cool summer character that most of west Texas cannot claim. Alpine grew slowly for its first three decades, a service center for the sprawling ranching operations that spread across Brewster County in every direction. Three saloons, a hotel, a livery stable, a butcher shop: that was the town's commercial inventory in its early years.
Then, in the early nineteen twenties, two things changed everything. Sul Ross State Normal College opened in nineteen twenty, bringing students and faculty and the steady economic pulse of a college town. And the first paved roads into the region were completed, connecting Alpine to the wider world by something other than railroad tracks.
Today Alpine serves as the county seat of Brewster County, the largest county by area in the state of Texas, a six-thousand-square-mile expanse of mountains, desert, and grassland that is simultaneously larger than the state of Connecticut. It is the gateway to Big Bend National Park, the regional hub for an enormous and sparsely populated corner of the American Southwest, and a small university town with an unexpectedly rich cultural life. The old naming debates are forgotten.
Nobody calls it Murphyville anymore.
