Texas Almanac, 1990-1991 Page: 54
611 p. : col. ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this book.
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TEXAS ALMANAC 1990-1991
Windmills, which opened West Texas to settlement by
tapping underground water sources, became common in
the area after the railroads brought them in to provide
water for their steam engines and their crews. This 10-
foot-diameter Eclipse mill stands atop a wooden tower
at Johnson City. Photograph by T. Lindsay Baker cour-
tesy Windmillers' Gazette, Rio Vista, Texas.
the Abilene Electric Light and Power company began
operating in 1891. After a group of private citizens built
an earthen dam on Lytle Creek in 1897, assuring a sta-
ble water supply, Abilene's appeal to potential immi-
grants was greatly enhanced.
Farther west, Midland's first official building was
a railroad mail car, brought in to serve as a post office,
depot and trading house when the T&P Railroad
arrived in 1881. Midland was first called Midway for its
location half-way between Fort Worth and El Paso. The
name was changed to Midland about the time town lots
were offered for sale by the Midland Town Company in
1885, the same year that Midland County was created.
At that time, the business district of Midland com-
prised two saloons, two general stores, a restaurant
and a wagon yard. Herman Nelson Garrett, a Califor-
nia sheepman, arrived in 1882 to become the first per-
manent white settler in the area. He was joined by
others in 1883. At first water was hauled from Mona-
hans, but soon windmills dotted the growing town.
John S. Scharbauer, who had raised sheep in Eastland,
Taylor, Nolan and Mitchell counties, moved to Mid-
land in 1887. He switched from sheep to cattle in 1888
and soon had a large herd of registered Herefords.
Odessa, also spawned by the coming of the rail-
road, was named by Russian railroad workers, who
thought that its wide, flat prairies resembled the
steppes near the Ukrainian town of Odessa. A group of
Pennsylvania realtors formed a townsite company to
sell lots in the fledgling town, and the glowing descrip-
tions published in their pamphlet in 1886 persuaded
several German Methodist families from Pennsylvania
to settle there. Although some early settlers dreamed
of making the area a wheat center, the realities of theclimate of western Texas dictated that it become a cow
town.
The Texas Central began laying tracks in the West
Central Texas region about the same time as the T&P,
reaching Albany from Ross, McLennan County, in 1882
and making it possible for Albany to develop into a
cattle-shipping point. The first public school district in
Albany was established in 1883, and other public and
private development was quick to follow.
The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe began building
west from Belton in Central Texas in 1882, reaching
Brownwood in 1885, extending on to Ballinger in 1886,
and reaching San Angelo in 1888. From the late 1880s
into the 1920s, the G,C & SF and her sister line, the Pan-
handle and Santa Fe Railway Company, crisscrossed
the West and West Central Texas by a combination of
construction of new track and the acquisition and link-
ing of smaller, short lines, bringing the efficiency of
rail transport, with its attendant access to markets, to
virtually all of the region.
As the railroads spanned western Texas, stage-
coaches were put out of business. Some short feeder
routes operated through the end of the 19th century,
however. A mail line linked San Angelo, Sherwood,
Knickerbocker, Sonora and Ozona for a number of
years after the turn of the century. The operator used
automobiles after 1908, but kept two horse-drawn
hacks to use in bad weather. The last trip on that route
was made in 1910.
Even before Northern markets demanded a better
quality of beef than that provided by the rangy Texas
longhorn cattle, scattered attempts had been made to
upgrade cattle herds in West Texas. In 1871, C. C.
Slaughter brought shorthorn bulls from Kentucky to
breed with selected heifers. Brothers W. D. and
George T. Reynolds introduced Durham cattle from
England by way of Colorado onto the range of their
Clear Fork Ranch in Shackelford County in 1875, and
by the early 1880s, Durhams were also found in several
other widely dispersed counties in the region, includ-
ing Tom Green. William S. Ikard brought Hereford
stock to his ranch in Wichita, Clay and Archer counties
as early as 1876, and 29 Hereford bulls were imported
by a Fisher County ranchman in the late 1880s.
Attempts were made in Shackelford and Taylor
counties in the mid-1880s to create a dual-purpose ani-
mal by cross-breeding beef cattle with dairy cattle -
Jerseys in Shackelford, Holsteins in Taylor. But any
improvement in the quality of Texas cattle depended
on fencing the Texas Plains to separate blooded ani-
mals from common range stock.
Cattle raisers in the Cross Timbers and farther
east had easy access to fencing materials in the wood-
ed lands around them. They generally kept relatively
small herds on stock farms and managed easily with
rail or stone fences. But on the plains, the amount of
land required to maintain each animal was much
greater, and water was much scarcer. Traditional
fencing materials were not readily available, and even
when they were obtainable, buying enough to enclose
enormous tracts of range lands on the plains was pro-
hibitively expensive. Barbed wire made fencing these
vast expanses feasible.
Barbed wire was first patented in November 1874
by Illinois farmer Joseph Farwell Glidden, who
invented it, some say, to keep dogs out of his wife's
flower garden. Soon Glidden was manufacturing the
stickery stuff in a factory in DeKalb, Ill. Called by
some "the Devil's hatband," barbed wire first
appeared in Texas in the late 1870s. The barbed-wire
revolution was spurred on its way by flamboyant sales-
man John W. "Bet-a-Million" Gates, who, in a demon-
stration of the usefulness of the new product, built a
corral of it in downtown San Antonio. After herding a
number of longhorn steers into the enclosure, he bet
everyone present that the animals could not get out.
This dramatic bit of showmanship resulted in more
orders for the wire than the factory could fill. One en-
terprising hardware store owner offered to replace his
customers' rail fences with barbed wire fences and sell
the fence rails thus replaced for firewood. In some
cases, the sale of the rails it replaced more than paid
for the wire fence. There were eventually more than a
thousand different designs of barbed wire patented.
The cattlemen who were determined to improve
the quality of their herds soon strung miles of barbed
wire. In fact, they often fenced not only land that they
owned or leased, but also public land that was sup-
posed to be open to all. When asked how much land he
claimed, one cattleman replied, "Everything from
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Kingston, Mike. Texas Almanac, 1990-1991, book, 1989; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth162512/m1/56/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.