Marathon: Gateway at the End of the Road

Marathon exists because of a railroad and a surveyor's classical education. When the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway pushed west through the Trans-Pecos in eighteen eighty-two, the crew reached this wide basin at the foot of the Glass Mountains. Railroad surveyor Captain Albion Shepard reportedly named the stop Marathon because the landscape reminded him of the plain near the ancient Greek city where the famous battle was fought.

The Gage Hotel, built in nineteen twenty-seven for area rancher Alfred Gage, became the town's social center. It declined for decades until nineteen seventy-eight, when J. P.

Bryan bought it, and his restoration, which reopened the hotel in nineteen eighty-two, helped launch Marathon as a destination for Big Bend visitors. Today the town of fewer than five hundred people is the primary gateway to Big Bend National Park, forty miles south. It has more art galleries per capita than almost anywhere in Texas.