Marfa, Texas, sits at an elevation of 4,800 feet on the plateau between the Davis Mountains and the Chinati range. It is the county seat of Presidio County, a county larger than the state of Rhode Island, in the rolling desert of the Trans-Pecos. For the first century after the railroad arrived in 1883, Marfa existed for sheep, cattle, and the water stop it began as.
The town did not grow large. Its population peaked during the years Fort D.A. Russell was active, then fell. The fort, established in 1911 and used during both world wars, was decommissioned in 1946. Ranching remained the economic base, but the number of operators shrank. By the 1970s, Marfa was a quiet county-seat town of about 2,000 people.
Before Chinati
The Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad brought Marfa into existence in 1883, and for fifty years the town's economy followed the seasonal rhythms of ranching. The land was suited for cattle, sheep, and goats; precipitation averages about fourteen inches a year. The county's population, always sparse, relied on railroad shipping and the supporting trades: feed, fencing, veterinary care, banking.
Fort D.A. Russell gave the town its only other substantial industry. During the First and Second World Wars, the base trained troops and housed prisoners of war. When it was decommissioned in 1946, its buildings, including two long artillery sheds and a row of barracks, passed to various uses and then sat empty. The ranching town continued, but its population drifted downward.
The Chinati Foundation
In 1971, Donald Judd, a New York artist associated with minimalism, began looking for a place to install permanent works away from the art world. He visited Marfa in 1973 and bought a large house there. In the following years he acquired land and buildings from the decommissioned fort, including the two artillery sheds. By the early 1980s he had enough space to plan exhibitions that would not fit inside a museum.
In 1986, Judd established the Chinati Foundation, named after the nearby mountains, with support from the Dia Art Foundation. The museum occupied the old fort's grounds, about 340 acres at the edge of town. Its permanent collection was designed to show the relationship between architecture, space, and art. Judd's own works include one hundred untitled boxes in mill aluminum, arranged in two rows in a former artillery shed, and fifteen untitled, hollow concrete blocks placed in a line across the desert. Six fluorescent light works by Dan Flavin are installed in a converted barracks. The museum's doors opened to the public shortly afterward.
The foundation changed the town's balance of trade. Visitors came to see the installations and to experience the desert landscape that Judd had chosen. Over the following decades, Marfa acquired a restaurant and hotel trade, and a cluster of smaller galleries and art spaces followed. The city's population, which had fallen to about 1,700 by the 1990s, remained roughly the same size, but the character of its commerce shifted. Today, the Chinati Foundation is one of the area's largest employers. Land values around the town center have risen sharply, and some ranch holdings have been converted to lodging or second homes.
The transition is visible on the ground. The old fort buildings are maintained as exhibition spaces, set against open desert. On Highland Avenue, the courthouse still anchors the square, and stock trailers occasionally pass through, but many storefronts now sell art books, ceramics, and coffee. The working ranch economy has not vanished; it persists in the surrounding county, where the population density remains very low. But Marfa's role within that economy has changed. It is no longer primarily a service town for ranchers. It is a place that people travel to, sometimes from other countries, to see art in a remote landscape.
