Plateau

Plateau is on Interstate Highway 10 and the Missouri Pacific line sixteen miles east of Van Horn in south central Culberson County. The town, named for its location on a flat plain, was the site of a section house on the Texas and Pacific Railway, which built through the area in the early 1880s. A post office was established there in 1907, with Zachariah V. Payne as postmaster. In 1911 fifteen families lived in the surrounding 400 square miles. In 1914 Plateau had a population estimated at twenty and a general store owned by James O. Driggers, who was also postmaster. The community's post office was closed in 1916, but in the early 1940s the town had an estimated fifty inhabitants. By the early 1960s the estimated population of Plateau had dropped to only four; a few years later that total had increased to five, where it remained in 1990.