This Historic West Texas Hotel Has Been Welcoming Guests Since 1927

Nobody warns you that the best hotel in Texas sits in a town of about 400 people, on a highway most drivers use to get somewhere else. I love that. A great stay should feel like a secret you stumbled into, not a chain lobby with a waffle machine.

The Gage Hotel in Marathon is that secret. It opened in April 1927 and has been putting up travelers in buff brick and oak ever since, about 40 miles north of Big Bend National Park.

Below, I will walk you through the building, the rooms, the food, the bar with a white buffalo on the wall, and the 27 acres of gardens down the road.

A Trost Masterpiece in Buff Brick

Start with the building itself, because it is the reason the rest exists. The Gage is the work of Henry C. Trost, the El Paso architect whose firm, Trost and Trost, drew up so much of West Texas that you can road trip his buildings like a scavenger hunt.

Trost designed the hotel in the fall of 1926. He also gave the region the Paisano in Marfa, the Holland in Alpine and the El Capitan in Van Horn. Sleep in one and you know the feeling. Thick walls, deep shade, rooms that stay cool without trying.

The Gage is an L-shaped, two-story building with a single-story west wing, faced in textured buff brick that glows almost gold in late afternoon light. The front porch is gabled, with tile-faced stairs up to the door. Old records put the facade at 78 feet across.

Inside, the lobby keeps the original oak floors and oak woodwork, and the ceiling is crossed with heavy beams. Leather, wool and dark wood fill the space, and the whole room has that old-wood-and-saddle-soap smell a lobby in cattle country ought to have.

I have a weakness for hotels where the lobby is worth the visit even if you are not sleeping there. Wander in, sit down and just look up. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it earns that on the ceiling alone.

Four Very Different Ways to Sleep Here

The Gage is not one hotel so much as four stays that share a front desk. Which one you choose changes the whole trip, so this is the part I would think hardest about.

The Historic Hotel rooms are the original 1927 building, 14 remodeled rooms up those tile stairs and along the oak hallways. They are the smallest and the most atmospheric, with period furniture and the kind of creak underfoot that tells you the floor is nearly a century old.

Pro tip: Alfred Gage kept one room in the building as his personal office, and the hotel says you can book his room today. If you want to sleep where the cattle baron did his sums, ask for it by name when you call.

Los Portales is the courtyard wing, and it gets its own section below. Then there is the Captain Shepard House, a separate 1890 residence built by Albion E. Shepard, the railroad man who founded Marathon. The hotel restored it in 2012, and it sleeps a whole family, carriage house included.

Finally, the Casitas are standalone cottages scattered near the main hotel. The Wilson House comes with its own fireplace. These are the ones I would book for a long weekend when you want a front door of your own and a porch to drink coffee on.

Los Portales and the Courtyard That Sold Me

Los Portales is where I would stay, and the courtyard is why. Twenty adobe-brick rooms, added in 1992, wrap around a walled garden of trees, flowering plants and a fountain. Long covered porches run the whole way round, so you can sit in the shade at noon in July.

The rooms open through heavy Mexican double doors onto those porches, and inside they lean into the border. Think a fireplace in the corner, antler lamps, a pair of old chaps hung on the wall and hand-painted sinks with little pops of blue.

One travel writer who stayed there put it in a line I keep thinking about: the rooms have “soft beds and a homey fireplace perfect for the colder nights.” West Texas nights do get cold, even in October, and a lit fireplace in a hotel room never gets old.

Out in the courtyard, the seating is equipale, those woven Mexican pigskin chairs that somehow stay comfortable for hours. Bring a book. The birds will handle the soundtrack. Some Los Portales rooms are pet friendly too, which matters if your dog is part of the road trip.

What’s for Dinner at 12 Gage?

Dinner is at 12 Gage, the hotel’s restaurant, and it is the reason a lot of Big Bend travelers route through Marathon instead of straight to the park. The kitchen calls its food West Texas cuisine, which means the border on one side and the ranch on the other.

Steaks are the anchor. This is cattle country, and the beef gets treated with respect. But the dish people talk about afterward is the antelope, served as a steak over vegetable purees. If you have never tried it, this is the place. Lean, mild, nothing like its gamey reputation.

Save room for dessert. The Mexican chocolate brownie comes with tres leches ice cream, the kind of plate two people fight over with one spoon. Reservations go through OpenTable, and I would make one. There is nowhere else to eat at this level for a long way in any direction.

The dining room itself is warm and low-lit, so it feels dressed up without asking you to be. Jeans and boots are fine. This is Marathon, after all, and half the room just came in from a trail.

The Bar With a White Buffalo on the Wall

The White Buffalo Bar is named for exactly what you think. A mounted white buffalo head looks down over the room from the wall, above leather seats and a ceiling held up by viga posts. There is a fireplace for winter and a patio for every other season.

The margarita here is the famous one. Saveur magazine called the White Buffalo Margarita the best margarita in Texas, and Texas Monthly has listed the bar among the best hotel bars in the state. The tequila list is long enough to need a second read.

Texas Monthly also handed the White Buffalo Burger a best burger nod, and the bar menu is where I would eat on the second night. The bar opens daily at 3 in the afternoon, serves the full menu from 5:30 to 9:30, and closes at 11.

Most evenings there is live music out on the patio. Picture a guitar, a cold glass, the desert going purple behind the courtyard wall and no cell signal worth checking. That is the whole pitch.

Coffee, Barbecue and a Nanobrewery

The Gage has quietly become most of Marathon’s dining scene, and the rest of it is just as good. Mornings start at the V6 Coffee Bar, where the lattes are fresh and the green chile chorizo skillet is the breakfast I would order every single day.

The V6 is attached to the V6 Collection, the hotel’s shop, and it is dangerous. Pottery, textiles, jewelry, Big Bend books and West Texas art, all of it curated with the same eye that decorated the rooms. Budget an extra half hour and some suitcase space.

Down the road is the Brick Vault Brewery and Barbecue, the hotel’s casual sibling. A nanobrewery makes small batches on site, and the smoked meats are built to go with them. It is the flip-flops-and-brisket end of the Gage, and after a day in the park it hits just right.

A Pool, a Spa and 27 Acres of Gardens

The pool sits in its own walled garden, heated and paired with a hot tub, and on a spring afternoon it may be the most relaxing square of water in the Trans-Pecos. The Gage Spa offers massages and a eucalyptus sauna, and there is a fitness center for the guilty.

Then there are the Gage Gardens, a short walk from the hotel. Twenty-seven acres of walking trails, a rose garden, a pond, a fountain, an orchard, a small vineyard and even a putting green, all planted into the Chihuahuan Desert like a mirage. Dogs are welcome on the paths.

I would walk the gardens early, when the light is low and the roses still hold the night’s cool. Then again after dinner, because Marathon sits under some of the darkest skies in the continental United States. The Milky Way here is not a faint smudge. It has texture.

A Brief History: From Cattle Baron to Rescue

Alfred S. Gage was born in Vermont in 1860 and reached Texas in 1878, an 18-year-old with nothing. By the 1920s he controlled more than half a million acres of West Texas grassland. He needed a headquarters on the railroad, and Marathon, founded in 1882, was it.

So in 1926 Gage hired Henry Trost to design a hotel that could double as the nerve center of his ranching empire. He financed half the construction himself and reserved one room as his office. The Ponsford Brothers of El Paso built it, and the doors opened in April 1927.

Gage barely got to enjoy it. He died about a year after the opening, and the hotel passed to his two daughters. Over the decades it hosted cattle buyers, railroad men and Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Zane Grey is said to have written here too.

Then the highway traffic thinned, the trains stopped carrying passengers and the Gage faded. By the 1970s it was closed and falling apart. That is when J.P. Bryan, a Houston oilman and a direct descendant of Stephen F. Austin, drove into Marathon and bought it.

Bryan paid about $30,000 for the hotel in 1978, and by his own account it was a wreck inside. He spent years researching what Trost built and putting it back, and the Gage reopened in the early 1980s. He has been restoring it, and much of Marathon, ever since.

Bryan added Los Portales in 1992, then the gardens, the spa, the restaurant and the bar. Condé Nast Traveler has ranked the Gage the number one hotel in Texas, and Travel and Leisure named it a top ten Texas resort. Not bad for a town of 400.

Your Base Camp for Big Bend and the Stars

The practical genius of the Gage is where it sits. Persimmon Gap, the north entrance to Big Bend National Park, is about 40 miles south on U.S. 385. That makes the hotel a real base camp, not just a night on the way in.

My plan would be three nights. One day in the park, one day for Marfa and Alpine, and one day where you do nothing but the pool, the gardens, the bar and the sky. That last day is the one you will remember.

Tips Before You Book

Book early for spring and fall. Spring wildflowers and the cool months fill the hotel months ahead, and there are only so many rooms in Marathon. Weekdays are easier than weekends, and the historic rooms are usually the last to go because people underestimate them.

Pack layers. Desert days run warm and nights run cold in the same 24 hours, and you will want a jacket for the patio even in May. Bring a red flashlight if you plan to stargaze, and leave the phone in the room. There is not much signal anyway.

Pro tip: eat one dinner at 12 Gage and one at the White Buffalo Bar. They are two different moods from the same kitchen, and skipping either is a mistake I would not want you to make on my account.

How to Get There

Where: The Gage Hotel, 102 NW 1st Street (U.S. Highway 90), Marathon, TX 79842. You can reach the front desk at 1 (800) 884-4243 or through the hotel’s website.

Marathon is about 30 miles east of Alpine on Highway 90, and roughly three to four hours from Midland or El Paso by car.

Fly into Midland or El Paso, rent a car and enjoy the drive. The hotel sits right on the highway in the middle of town, so you cannot miss the buff brick and the gabled porch.

Come Sleep in a Piece of West Texas

Nearly a hundred years after the doors first opened, travelers still climb those tile stairs and find the same thing: thick walls, a cool room, a good meal and a sky that goes on forever. You will too.

So point the car west, book the courtyard room with the fireplace, and order the antelope. Then step out under the stars and let a 1927 hotel remind you what a hotel is for.

Featured image: @ Gage Hotel