Annie Riggs Memorial Museum

We decided to stop in Fort Stockton, TX for a couple of days and visit the sites.

One of the best sites in town is the Hotel turned into a museum which displays a lot of the articles from the pioneer days.

The hotel began construction in 1899 and finished in 1901. The cowboys needed a place to stay when they came to town which is also the county seat for Pecos County so they all got together and put up the money to build it. It is made of exposed adobe bricks with walls two feet thick and ceilings fourteen feet high. There are 15 rooms nine of which are guest rooms.

When you stayed at the hotel you did not rent a room, you rented a bed and there were two beds in a room. It cost 50 cents a night and if you wanted a private room you had to rent two beds! Annie Riggs purchased the hotel in 1905 for $5,000.00 with $3000.00 cash and the balance in payments. (To be able to come up with that much cash back then was astounding.)

Here is a picture of an inner courtyard at the hotel. It is a very pretty place.








The folks in the museum showed us a desk that sits in the lobby of the hotel. It seems that this desk has a history.

It seems that it sat in the 1883 courthouse office of the Sheriff by the name of A. J. Royal. Sheriff Royal was one of those that took advantage of the office and was expropriating from the locals everything he could including complete ranches. He came up for election in 1894 and it was a very volatile and fueding atmosphere so the governor sent in 5 Texas Rangers to monitor the situation.

In the meantime a group of local business men got together to draw straws to see who got the pleasure of killing Sheriff Royal. Well, the election came and went and Sheriff Royal was not reelected. Several of the Rangers left and two weeks after the election poor old Sheriff Royal was shot and killed while sitting at the desk. There is a drawer with some of his blood stains still visible. Even with the three Rangers still in town, there was never any solution to the crime.

The museum holds many artifacts from around the area. One display is of many fossils which is quite interesting.