Last year owners of 448 of the 530 adobe homes in Marfa — 85 percent — protested the increased appraisals. Some of them received adjustments, but not Maria Flores, a 57-year-old house cleaner. She saw her taxes rise to $1,050 this year, compared with $752 five years ago. The appraisal board told her that because of improvements she’d made — a fresh coat of paint and a new fence — her tax would not be lowered.

Originally a water stop along the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, Marfa began as a sleepy ranching town that was de facto segregated well into the 1960s. Most of the existing adobe homes were located on the south side of the railroad tracks, without plumbing and electricity.

“The Hispanics, in my time, all lived in little adobe houses,” said Rito Rivera, 78, who still lives in one of those houses. “The Anglos were ranchers — cowboys and landowners — and they could afford better material.”

The appraisal on his adobe house increased from $39,770 five years ago to $104,660 this year. Mr. Rivera recently learned that he had prostate cancer, unlucky news that came with one upside: Under state law, it helped him qualify for a veteran’s disability exemption from his rising tax bill. But an adobe home his wife inherited from family in town saw its bill spike to $1,925 from $1,170 five years earlier.

Fortunes changed for Marfa, and adobe, when the sculptor Donald Judd arrived in the 1970s and turned its empty expanses into something of a vast outdoor studio. Marfa came to signify something within the art world, people from far reaches traveled to the desert to see it, and the prices of things began to reflect the cities they came from.