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Designed to permanently commemorate the
open-range era in the West, 14 life-size bronzes of rangy Longhorns
were sculpted and placed in a natural setting in front of the DeVitt-Mallet
Museum Building at the National Ranching Heritage Center. The
park-like area was named to honor the memory of longtime Four Sixes
Ranch Manager J.J. Gibson of Guthrie, Texas. |
David M. DeVitt and
Mallet Ranch Museum Building
Modern-day stress fades at the main entrance of
the DeVitt-Mallet Museum Building. Inside, the pace slows; the
tension eases. The feeling of being in a sprawling ranch building is
real—the museum was designed by architects Bill Cantrell Planners
Inc. to reflect the character of Texas and Southwestern ranch
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For more than two decades, land at the National
Ranching Heritage Center stood vacant, awaiting Los Corralitos, the
“Little Corrals.” What the Ranch Headquarters Planning Committee
did not know when they identified the old fortified home for
placement in the historical park were the secrets that had been
sealed inside it for more than 200 years. Those secrets would
eventually cause Los Corralitos to be the only total reproduction at
the National Ranching Heritage Center.
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More.
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It is a paradox that a crude log cabin, so
ordinary in character and clouded by uncertainties, could boast an
eminent genealogy. El Capote has been linked with royalty,
politicians, war heroes and a future United States President. Read More. |
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The Old West is a story with many chapters,
each one comprised of the people who played a role in the settlement
of the new frontier. The log house from south of Fort Mason, Texas,
represents one of those chapters. It’s a story of 7,000 German
immigrants to Texas, an unsolved murder and the transformation of a
building as the times called for a change.
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Stories of Indian attacks, cattle drives and
the women left behind to tend the ranch have been recreated in
movies and other works of fiction. The prototype for those stories
could have been created by the family who lived in the stone house
on the JOLY Ranch in Palo Pinto County, Texas.
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Just inside the
west boundary of Knox County, Texas, some 25 miles northeast of
Guthrie, a 12-foot by 16-foot rock building stands alone in the Mare
Pasture of the Lowrance Ranch. Known by ranch hands over the years
as the Mail Camp, the structure may have been built in the late
1870s near a military road, later used as a stage line route.
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Civilization pushed West of the Mississippi
River, erecting homes as it went. It stopped short of West Texas,
however, stunned by the arid, flat country. The land was said to be
an “uninhabitable wasteland” by Army explorer R.B. Marcy. So
most people avoided the area and moved elsewhere. True adventurers
who saw the West Texas plains as a place where cattle could get fat,
cautiously ventured in. There, they encountered an environment void
of anything to disrupt the endless horizon. For shelter, they
scooped out a hole in the ground.
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The Waggoner Ranch Commissary represents the
large ranch that provided for its own during the growth and
development of the cattle industry in the West. It stands for family
continuity over the generations and for the impact of oil discovery
on ranch land.
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Almost anything was possible in the American
West, when determination was behind a goal. Christopher Columbus
Slaughter (1837-1919) is a perfect example of such a story. His
ranch, including leased land, at one time totaled more than two
million acres. Yet it started out as a mere hole in the ground. His
Long S Whiteface Camp headquarters is a link between the simplest of
dugouts and later homes built when the railroad made lumber
accessible.
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A ranch wife refused to move West with her
husband until he promised to build her a frame house above ground.
She told him, “I will not have dirt over my head until I die.”
So, he built her a box and strip house, which may or may not have
made her happy. Although economical, these houses had no insulation.
The walls moved in and out during a strong wind. In a snowstorm,
streaks of snow that corresponded exactly with the cracks in the
wall formed on bed quilts.
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The usual ranch schoolhouse was a one-room
building named for the rancher or the ranch. Others had colorful
monikers like Lick Skillet, Possum Trot, Cedar Ridge, Hell Roaring
Holler and Chicken Foot. The Bairfield Schoolhouse was briefly
called Polecat University, after an encounter with a skunk. Like the
16-by-16-foot Bairfield Schoolhouse from near Clarendon, Texas, the
schools remained as long as children needed them.
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It took four owners and 34 years to build the
house that was situated in a quiet draw beside Hackberry Creek in
Scurry County. But it only took the sisters Fay and Myrtle Harrell,
plus “a jackleg carpenter,” a little more than a year to totally
restore it from near total dilapidation. The dwelling sheltered
families during the era that began with free-range ranching and
ended with barbed wire and agriculture. The Harrell House is typical
of home expansion. The rancher or farmer could ill afford to discard
any building. As families grew and fortunes improved, houses,
likewise, expanded.
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“Home was wherever a cowboy hung his hat.”
The cliché had truth to it. Cowboys of the American West were
vagabonds, roaming from place to place. At the ranch headquarters,
the bunkhouse was their home until they moved on again.
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The latest addition to Proctor Park reminds visitors
of the contributions of Daniel Webster "80 John" Wallace to the
history of ranching.
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The XIT, according to author/historian Joe B.
Frantz, was the largest ranch under fence in the United States and
probably the world. It was not a financial success, he said, but the
ranch was significant. “It showed there need not be a conflict
between now and the future. As civilization crowded in, the XIT made
room for it and welcomed it, and so became a part of the folklore of
history. The investors intended from the beginning to sell out, to
become a great land development company to bring settlers in.”
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The JA is among the best-known ranches in Texas
and perhaps the entire Southwest. Well-run through more than 100
years, its good management plus the cast of players who owned and
operated the ranch have propelled the JA into a prominent place in
history. The people behind the formation of the JA Ranch were
Charles Goodnight, John Adair and Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie Adair,
an unlikely partnership, or so many thought.
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The 400,000-acre Matador Ranch was one of
several huge spreads owned or backed by foreign investors. Unlike
some that were bought to ultimately be sold again as farm and ranch
development property, the Matador was bought for the long haul. From
the beginning, it was managed to be a profit-making, productive
ranch. Because of close supervision by its Scottish owners of
everything from cowboy etiquette to the books, the business was
profitable far into the 20th century.
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It was the dream of Joseph James Barton to have
his elegant, two-and-a-half-story house located near a railroad
depot and train. Although with much effort to make the dream a
reality, it didn’t materialize. The Bartons’ home was the first
structure in a planned community on a railroad line that never came
through.
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The most distinct sound on a ranch was the ring
of a blacksmith’s hammer hitting iron. The smell of coal or
burning mesquite wood filled the air, as bar iron glowed red in the
hot fire. In short order, the skilled blacksmith created a new rim
for a wagon wheel, a pair of shoes for the mule team, a branding
iron for the ranch hands and repaired the windmill for the ranch. On
a large spread, one of the first structures built was the
blacksmith’s shop. And one of the most valuable ranch hands was
the smithy.
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Spur
Granary and Stables
The Spur Granary was built with
“sweat equity,” long before anyone knew what those words meant.
Ultimately, it was designed to make an easier job each day of
feeding the ranch’s horses. At the time of its donation to the
National Ranching Heritage Center in 1969, the structure was still
operative, but it was presented for preservation and interpretation
because of its historical value. The granary represents human
ingenuity and innovation, byproducts of this well-known ranch.
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Not every rancher had a carriage house, and
certainly not those just starting out. The building housed fine
buggies and surreys, pulled by excellent horses. The carriage house
was a possession aspired to by many young men. It came with
prosperity and usually a wife and children, as most dignified ladies
did not ride long distances horseback. The carriage house was an
accouterment of John B. Slaughter’s fine ranch headquarters in
Post, Texas, made possible from years of hard work and smart
business transactions.
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In the 1920s, the Canon Ranch in
southwest Texas built this sheep hospital shed to aid in the battle
against the screwworm infestation. Prior to the 1962 screwworm
eradication program along the Texas/Mexico border, the worms were
killing hundreds of head of livestock every year. The cowboys on the
ranch carried medicine in their saddlebags to treat wounds on
animals in the pasture, but there was only so much that could be
done to help in the pasture. More severe cases of infestation were
brought to the hospital shed where the livestock could be protected
from flies while the wounds were treated.
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The cattle business could be a good life for
those who worked hard and were lucky. Money made from cattle drives
often built homes and barns on ranches throughout the West. One such
sizeable structure became the stable for Thoroughbred race horses
and game cocks, not the kind of livestock found on a typical ranch.
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The railroad depot was an exciting place. With
people coming and going and cowhands returning from cattle markets,
all sorts of news was brought from other towns to the far-flung
settlements in the West. In the depot, all the arrangements were
made for cattle movement, package and freight shipment and passenger
travel. Most depots looked similar—even the paint colors were
standardized by the railroad company that built them. In some towns,
the depot was just one of several buildings comprising a railhead.
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If walls could speak, what might
this old barn tell? It was built by one of the most influential and
prosperous ranchers in Texas and eventually housed expensive horses
with fine bloodlines, animals admired by some of the wealthiest men
and women in the West. For many years a landmark in Guthrie, Texas,
the 6666 (pronounced “Four Sixes”) Barn stood near the imposing home
Samuel Burk Burnett built in 1917 to be “the finest ranch house in
West Texas,” headquarters of his ranching empire.
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The simple
wood-frame structure was a sanctuary for family reunions, birthday
parties and, of course, daily meals for the ranch hands and cowboys
as early as 1900. The building sat just a few yards away from the
Big House, where many of the Pitchfork ranch managers made their
home. A few yards out the back door of the Cookhouse, the land drops
off to the north bank of the South Wichita River. Horses graze in
nearby pastures. Tamed wild turkeys milled around nearby eating corn
chips thrown out for them by the cook. And at every mealtime, the
old dinner bell was rung to call everyone in to eat.
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