Texas Tales: Ghost Town of Shumla Rises Again Thanks to Innovative School

It's been a long time since a train stopped at Shumla, a West Texas ghost town as ethereal as steam escaping from a coal-fired locomotive.

Shumla had its beginning in 1881 as construction crews raced to connect the eastern and western halves of America's second and southern-most transcontinental rail line. Once a tent city stretching more than a mile long, it teemed with hundreds of Chinese and European-immigrant graders and track layers as well as crew bosses, engineers, and a variety of camp followers including peddlers, whiskey sellers, gamblers and working women you wouldn't feel comfortable introducing to mom.

One of the railroad engineers had been to Eastern Europe and thought the area 15 miles west of Comstock in present Val Verde County looked like the countryside around the Ottoman fortress of Shumla in the Balkans. Accordingly, the Southern Pacific put the spot on its system map as Shumla, Texas.

Though Shumla's original reason for existence ended with the completion of the tracks, steam-powered trains needed to take on water and coal about every 30 miles. Once regular east-west traffic began, Shumla became a section point with a depot, water tank and foreman's house.

Despite its depot, Shumla did not have enough population to support a post office until 1906. But Shumla never saw better days than when the construction workers camped there.

Shumla was only one of many construction camps along the SP right of way, though not all of them survived as towns. The most common indications of camp sites are occasional sets of stone walls about two-and-a-half feet tall once used as canvas tent bases.

Professional archeologists and relic hunters over the years have found woks, opium bottles, fragments of tea cups and Chinese coins around these camp sites in addition to other trash associated with construction and temporary human occupation.

At Shumla, a 1995 archeological survey noted the remnants of a rectangular dry-laid stone structure about 20 feet wide and 70 feet long, a collapsed dome oven used for bread baking, a piled stone forge for blacksmith work and rock piles suggesting tent sites.