The Grape Creek Education Foundation
Butterfield Days Celebration
150 Years of the Butterfield Trail
Grape Creek Station Founded-Sept. 24, 1858

Join the celebration of 150 years of Grape Creek along with the 150th Anniversary of the Butterfield Trail.

             For more information:  www.FlyButterfield.com

WHY A BUTTERFIELD DAYS 150 YEAR CELEBRATION?

            With the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Creek in California in 1848, the emergent Pacific Coast raised an affluent cry for mail, news, and faster passenger service from the East.  Half a million people in the State of California, the Oregon Territory, and the gold camps of Nevada demanded closer ties with “home”.

            In response to this demand, on April 20, 1857, the United States Post Office Department advertised for bids on a mail route across the deadly wastes of the “Great American Desert,” as most of the Southwest was termed.  It called for a contract “for the conveyance of the entire letter mail from such point on the Mississippi River as the contractors may select, to San Francisco…  The contract winner had the right to pre-empt 320 acres “of any land not then disposed of or reserved, at each point necessary for a station, not to be nearer than ten miles from each other.  Service was to be “performed within twenty-five days for each trip.”

  John Butterfield, President of the Overland Mail Company, submitted a bid that provided for a line which would start west simultaneously from St. Louis and Memphis, converge at a point “to be determined later,” and then follow the 35^th Parallel to the West Coast.  Butterfield added to the bid that he and his group would be willing to alter “any portion of the route which the Postmaster General might decide best.”  That short phrase changed Texas history, for without it there would have been no Butterfield Trail across Texas.

Among those new stations that would be built along Butterfield’s Southern route was a small change station southwest of Fort Chadbourne known as Grape Creek Station.  The first west bound stage came through Grape Creek Station in the early morning hours of September 24, 1858.  The seed was planted that would grow into the present day community of Grape Creek.