Marfa: The Water Stop at the Edge of the World
Near Marfa, Texas
Marfa sits at an elevation of roughly forty-seven hundred feet on the broad Marfa Plateau of far west Texas, a small desert city that has led several lives at once. It is the county seat of Presidio County, one of the most remote county seats in the state, ringed by mountains, grasslands, and the kind of sky that stops people in their tracks. The town began in the early eighteen eighties as a railroad water stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway.
Steam locomotives needed water, and there was water here, and so a small settlement grew up around the tank and the tracks. The name has a literary origin that most people find surprising. It was suggested, according to tradition, by the wife of a railroad executive who was reading Jules Verne's novel Michael Strogoff during the journey west.
In the novel, there is a character named Marfa Strogoff, and the word was appealing, and so a Russian literary name landed in the Trans-Pecos desert of Texas. The post office opened under that name in eighteen eighty-three. The town grew slowly, becoming a supply center for the ranching families spread across the high desert.
For decades it was simply a working frontier city. A county courthouse was built. A hotel went up to serve travelers on the Southern Pacific line.
An army post was established on the edge of town in the years before World War One, when the border with Mexico was unsettled and the Army needed a presence in this isolated region. In nineteen thirty, Marfa had a population of nearly four thousand people. Then the ranching economy shifted, the railroad declined in importance, and Marfa began to shrink.
By the nineteen seventies it was a small, quiet place with beautiful bones and cheap rents, the kind of town artists go looking for. What happened next turned Marfa into something singular: a tiny city in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert that became a serious destination for international contemporary art, a film location beloved by major directors, and home to one of the most talked-about unexplained atmospheric phenomena in the American Southwest. The town is one thing and its reputation is another, and they coexist in interesting tension.
