Frontiersmen began to immigrate into the South Concho Valley in the 1870s, settling along the “Toe Nail” trail from Fort McKavett to Fort Concho. By the mid-1880s the settlement began to develop and a Union church was organized. The South Concho Irrigation Co. was established in 1885 and built a dam and 3 miles of canal to furnish water to dry farmland. Christopher C. Doty (1857-1944), who had arrived in Texas in 1879, opened a store and applied for a post office in 1888. After his application for “Alice” was rejected because another office already had that name, he suggested “Christobal,” Spanish for Christopher. Confirmation of the post office's establishment and Doty’s appointment as postmaster arrived in Jan. 1889, but the spelling had been changed to Christoval. After a flood in Aug. 1906, a tract of bottomland was purchased for a city park, which became a popular Baptist campground and the site of Confederate reunions attended by thousands of regional residents. A bath house built in 1915 at nearby Mineral Wells was the first of several local health facilities. The arrival of the Panhandle & Santa Fe Railroad in 1930 made Christoval a shipping point for the area sheep, wool, and cattle industries.