Station	Antelope Gap Lampasas County Milepost _______ (name change to) Scallorn Mills County Milepost _______
Origin of Station Name	This station, a switch near the county line between Lometa and Goldthwaite, was renamed and relocated a short distance northward in 1917. The switch at Antelope Gap was named for nearby Antelope Creek, which flows westward to the Colorado.
Agency Opened
1886 Personnel	Depot Staff - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Other Personnel - - - - - -
1890 Insured Structures
1921 Depot(s)
1946 Traffic Report
“The Earth” Press Coverage
Employee Magazine Coverage
Junction Other Lines
Agency Closed
Photographic Images
Operating Bulletins
Railroad Commission Complaints
Legal Department Files
Remarks This station, a switch near the county line between Lometa and Goldthwaite, was renamed and relocated a short distance northward in 1917. The switch at Antelope Gap was named for nearby Antelope Creek, which flows westward to the Colorado. The Santa Fe tracks between Lometa and Goldthwaite closely follow the old military road which ran northwestward from here to Fort Phantom Hill in the 1850s. The road (and later the railroad) was located at the western foot of a north-south trending series of majestic mesas some of which rise to an elevation of nearly 1700 feet (compared to an elevation of about 1000 feet at the location of Hancock Springs at Lampasas). These mesas posed an obstacle to the builders of the military road, just as they did to railroad construction engineers desirous of avoiding steep grades which would increase consumption of fuel and water by locomotives. Texas General Land Office maps from the 1850s show “Antilope Creek” just west of the military road, and it seems likely that early Anglo travelers through the area named it for what were once locally abundant herds of pronghorn antelope. For a thorough discussion on the historical distribution of antelope in Texas, see “Texas Natural History: A Century of Change” by David J. Schmidly (Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, 2002) at pages 117, 273 and 406: “…a notable number of Texas mammals…have undergone drastic range reductions and today occupy a mere scant portion of their former range. The pronghorn antelope (antilocapra americana) once occurred over the western two thirds of Texas…” One wishes that the pronghorn herds might someday return to Antelope Creek, but the suppression of range fires which accompanied the arrival of the Anglo culture allowed the takeover of open grasslands by juniper and other undesirable brush, such that antelope will never again freely roam the mesas of west central Texas except by some determined restorative effort. Without the antelope and its companion the buffalo, the larger predators could not survive, and so likewise retreated from the territory. Schmidly’s book contains at page 403 a photograph of the last jaguar killed in Mills County, in 1903. The Santa Fe’s Texas stations of Antelope Gap and Buffalo Gap (located on the line from Coleman to Clovis) bore names which were vestiges of an era lost even before the tracks arrived, and further changed the country. The Santa Fe never operated a manned agency at the Antelope Gap station, but did have a small section crew headquartered and residing there. The crew of section 34 in 1886 seems by the list of surnames to have been perhaps somewhat Irish in composition. These men were Foreman John Muldoon, and laborers Dan O’Brine, J. W. Brooks, Pat Roach and J. E. Muldoon. The 1890 insurance schedule lists only one structure at this station, a section house. There is no coverage of either station in the legal department files or the operating bulletins. There is coverage in the Railroad Commission correspondence record, which contains a petition from the citizens of Scallorn, a community located a short distance north of Antelope Gap, to relocate the station facilities from Antelope Gap to their community. The Commission approved this request on June 30, 1917. The 1921 company building inventory for Scallorn shows a box car depot, a section house built in 1895 (18’ by 30’, with fence), a tool house (half of a boxcar), a mail crane, a station sign, a water well and water tank, a water closet, a stock pen, and three “Mexican bunkhouses”. It seems that the size of the section crew had expanded considerably by 1921. A photograph of the Section Foreman’s home taken by a company photographer to support a valuation survey for the Interstate Commerce Commission c.1921 illustrates a rather peaceful looking abode. A post office was established at Antelope Gap on June 3, 1892, with John E. Stevenson as the first postmaster. This office was located in the first floor of the Harry Hotel, a two story structure which also had a store and dining room on the first floor. The post office was discontinued in the spring of 1914. A post office was established at Scallorn on November 28, 1916. The first postmaster was Suzie Nation, and the final postmaster was John H. Kuykendall, who operated a combined post office, general store and barber shop until the early 1930s. The Santa Fe stopped its passenger trains at Antelope Gap and Scallorn on flag signal from any waiting passenger. In addition, and without stopping, railway post office employees would pitch out a mailbag of arriving mail when passing the station, and grab a bag of outgoing mail from the mail crane which stood just beside the tracks.