Langtry, Texas

01How the Railroad Made Langtry

The town was first called Eagle Nest, a grading camp the Southern Pacific set up near the Eagle Nest crossing of the Rio Grande so that its line could join the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway at the site. The camp was renamed for George Langtry, an engineer and foreman who had supervised a Chinese work crew building the railroad. A common legend — repeated on postcards for more than a century — holds that the town was named for the English actress Lillie Langtry. It wasn't. George Langtry came first; Lillie's name attached itself later, through the saloonkeeper who saw a marketing opportunity.

The post office opened in 1884, two years after the camp's founding. By 1892 Langtry had a general store, a depot, two saloons, and a handful of section houses strung along the tracks. The town's population was never large — census counts and local histories suggest it hovered around fifty in its early years — but its position on the railroad gave it outsize importance as a watering stop and a place where trains paused long enough for passengers to disembark, stretch, and, increasingly, drink.

02Who Was the Law West of the Pecos?

Shortly after the railroad's completion, a Kentucky-born drifter named Roy Bean arrived in Langtry and set up a saloon on Southern Pacific land. He christened it the Jersey Lilly, a misspelled tribute to Lillie Langtry, whom he had reportedly seen only in photographs and never met. Bean obtained a commission as a justice of the peace and notary public, and for roughly two decades he dispensed rulings from the porch of the Jersey Lilly with a single copy of the 1879 Revised Statutes of Texas and a revolver on the bar.

Bean's courtroom antics have been inflated by a century of film and pulp fiction — Walter Brennan played him in 1940's "The Westerner," opposite Gary Cooper, and Paul Newman took the role in John Huston's 1972 picture — but the documented record is strange enough on its own. He levied fines that conveniently matched the cash in a defendant's pockets, officiated at inquests and weddings with the same casual authority, and wrote repeatedly to Lillie Langtry inviting her to visit. She finally did, in 1904 — ten months after Bean's death in March 1903. She was given his pistol as a keepsake.

03What Killed the Town?

Langtry's slow fade began almost as soon as the automobile arrived. In the early twentieth century the main east-west highway was rerouted slightly north of the settlement, taking through-traffic away from the old railroad grade. The depot closed, the general store shuttered, and the section crews that had kept the railroad buildings occupied drew down as diesel replaced steam and the Southern Pacific needed fewer hands along the line. By the 1970s, according to the Handbook of Texas, the resident population had slipped to around forty.

Unlike many Texas ghost towns, Langtry did not collapse into total abandonment. A small number of families stayed on, and the state of Texas eventually recognized the site's outsize place in frontier mythology. The Texas Department of Transportation opened the Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center on the old saloon grounds, preserving the original Jersey Lilly building and a replica of Bean's home, the Opera House — which never hosted an opera and which Lillie Langtry, on her belated 1904 visit, was at least able to see.

04Can You Visit Langtry Today?

Yes. Langtry lies on U.S. Highway 90 about sixty miles west of Del Rio, and the Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center is free and open most days of the year. The original Jersey Lilly saloon still stands, weathered but intact, its plank bar and pot-bellied stove preserved behind glass. A cactus garden interprets Chihuahuan Desert flora, and short trails lead toward overlooks of the Pecos River canyon, which Judge Bean himself used as a venue for prizefights staged on a sandbar in the riverbed — a dodge meant to skirt Texas laws against boxing by moving matches into the disputed borderland between jurisdictions.

The surrounding landscape is starkly beautiful and largely empty. Seminole Canyon State Park, with its 4,000-year-old rock art, lies a few miles east, and the Amistad National Recreation Area begins not far downstream. Cell service is intermittent, gas stations are scarce, and the nearest lodging is in Comstock or Del Rio.

05What Remains of Langtry Today

The Jersey Lilly saloon, the reconstructed Opera House, the state visitor center, a handful of occupied dwellings, and the old Southern Pacific right-of-way running east toward the high bridge over the Pecos. The post office closed decades ago. The cemetery, small and wind-scoured, holds a few dozen graves, including railroad workers whose names have weathered off the stones. Trains still pass, but they do not stop.