The former Koehler Hotel, an F-plan, one-story, house-like building of adobe with a gabled wood-shingle roof and Queen Anne decoration, was built by the Fort Stockton Hotel Company, a partnership of six local citizens. Annie Frazer Johnson Riggs, who began managing the hotel in 1901, bought it in 1904, changed its name to the Riggs Hotel, and ran it until her death in 1931. The numerous spindles and brackets on the galleries surrounding the building, the bargeboards, the wood shingling in the gable ends, and the scalloped eaves were added later to the adobe construction.
Fort Stockton is rich in vernacular architecture, especially adobe buildings. Across from the Koehler at 101 E. Callaghan Street is the one-story, side-gabled, adobe Grey Mule Saloon (c. 1890). At the southwest edge of the courthouse square, St. Joseph Catholic Church (1877; later alterations; 403 S. Main) is a sturdy adobe structure with a high, thick screen wall that steps up in tiers to a central bell-cote and masks the church’s gabled roof. A side-gable-roofed, one-story adobe house with a shed-roofed front porch, built in stages (School House, 1883) at 201 W. Gallagher Street, exemplifies a late-nineteenth–early-twentieth-century house type that reappears in Fort Stockton. The oldest building in Fort Stockton is a stabilized adobe ruin, the J. D. Holiday House (c. 1855) at 201 W. Sherer Street.