Milton Faver, born about 1822 and dead in 1889, came from the Midwest United States to this area in the 1850s from Presidio del Norte, where he had owned a general store and operated a freighting business on the Chihuahua Trail. By the 1880s he controlled vast acreage in this part of the county, including most of the best permanent water sources, and developed a formidable cattle, sheep, and goat ranching empire. His three ranches, El Fortin del Cibolo, El Fortin de la Cienega, and La Morita, made up the largest single-owner landholdings in the county. Their dwellings, work rooms, fences, corrals, and irrigation systems were built with traditional adobe and stone methods. Census and tax records show that he owned the county's largest livestock herds in the late 19th century. After Milton Faver died in 1889, his wife Francisca in 1893, and his son Juan in 1913, the ranchlands were sold by the Faver heirs after a lawsuit. Other pioneer ranching families in the area, including George and Juliana Dawson, Francisca Faver's niece, and J.A. Pool, Sr. and J.W. Pool and their heirs, the Greenwood family, operated ranches on the former Faver lands until the late 20th Century.