Terlingua’s development was driven by large cattle ranches, the railroads that shipped the cattle to market, and its role as a center for the mining of mercury. The historic district covers a variety of sites in and around the loosely defined town site. From 1903 to 1943 Terlingua was a mining camp for the Chisos Mining Company, which engaged in extracting mercury from deep mines using mostly Mexican workers. In 1914 and in 1927, Chisos was the second largest mercury supplier in the nation. Transport to and from the area was limited to heavy carts, with the nearest railroad eighty miles away at Marfa. Only with improved roads in the 1930s was the isolation of the region somewhat reduced.
Available materials such as stone, adobe, and small wooden members were used for all the buildings in the town. St. Agnes Catholic Church (c. 1915; Solitario Saw Mill Road) is a plaster-covered adobe building on a rough stone base. Typical of southern church types, St. Agnes has a small bell tower and spire over the entrance, and its wooden gabled roof is sheathed in corrugated metal. Three windows on each side wall have lancet-shaped wooden sash windows set in rectangular openings. A wood-iramed, shed-roofed addition provides a sacristy, and a small adobe structure served as the rectory.
The house (1906; 1911 addition) for mine owner Howard E. Perry at Terlingua Ghost Town Road is a long, one-room-deep, Mexican vernacular adobe house. Originally one story with a distinctive shed-roofed portal, the house received a second floor and an arcaded porch in 1911. The house’s location on a prominence overlooking the mining town and its stylistic aspirations represented Perry’s dominance of his industrial landscape and its Mexican immigrant workers. The house is in a state of picturesque ruin.
The Terlingua Trading Company (Chisos Store) of 1908 at 100 Ivey Street was the company store, the heart of the mining camp’s economic and social activity. Because of limited access and distance to the nearest settlements, Perry held a monopoly on all necessities, including paying miners with company scrip that could be redeemed only at his company store. The gable-roofed adobe structure has repeatedly been enlarged and now includes a theater. A stone base and platform accommodates the building on its sloping site.