The Loneliest House in Texas
I want to share a story about the loneliest house in Texas — maybe in the US. This is the Williams Cabin, in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, in far West Texas, on the Texas/New Mexico border.
This is a view of the Guadalupe Mountains. They are part of a massive fossilized reef that was the shore of the shallow sea that covered most of what is now West Texas 300 million years ago. The fossilized reef was uplifted, and became these mountains.
This is a very remote area even today. Now it is part of the Chihuahuan Desert, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the area received more rain than it does today, and the natural grass was enough to support livestock so there were some isolated ranches.
In 1908, the brother of a man named Henry Belcher had a house built for him and his new bride on the southwest slope of the Guadalupe Mountains. She spent one night in the house and had enough; she left and never returned.
Here is the house. You can see it in the far distance. Can you imagine, in 1908, riding a horse carriage or wagon or whatever to this place, far off on the edge of the middle of nowhere? “Look honey, there’s our new house!”
Since his brother and his wife had left, Henry Belcher moved in with his wife Rena and their baby daughter Bernice. The house had a wood stove, bunk beds, and other furniture, and a luxury for the time, wallpaper. Water came from catchment tanks at the base of the mountains.
It's difficult to show in these photos how small you feel at this house. Those peaks behind rise 5,000 ft above you as you stand there. It is absolutely silent but for the wind blowing through the scrub. But the Belchers would have heard the sounds of the couple thousand longhorn cattle they ran in this valley and nearby.
Again, this was a very different place in the early 20th-century than now. There was plenty of wild game, as well as predators: bears, wolves, lions, bobcats, coyotes. Birds, including migratory birds and songbirds, were abundant.
But by 1917, rains had diminished, and that combined with overgrazing had reduced grasses, which were replaced with scrub. The Belchers departed, and James Adolphus Williams bought the ranch. He ran sheep and goats, which were better suited to the more arid environment.
Dolf Williams ranched this area until 1941, and after he died in 1942, the ranch was purchased by Judge J.C. Hunter. Judge Hunter’s son sold the ranch to the National Park Service in 1966. The Park Service has maintained the cabin since, which is in remarkable shape.
I visited the cabin in October 2015 with my camping buddy. It’s about an hour's drive through the park on a very rough dirt road; you will need a high-clearance 4x4, and you need to unlock a gate with a key you check out at the park ranger station. Part of the route overlaps with an old 19th-century stagecoach trail; there are markers showing the old trail.
Every so often I think about the people who lived in that cabin. The Belchers ran up to 3,000 head of longhorn cattle. A decade later, the land no longer supported cattle, and the new rancher switched to sheep and goats.
Now there’s nothing out there. I wonder if old Henry Belcher would recognize his ranch. One of these days we’ll go back, and sit on the porch, and drink to the memory of the tough Texans who carved a life out of such a hard land.
H/T to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park website, which has a nice article on the Williams Ranch. The photos in this article are all taken by me.
