3/8/07
Parmer County Centennial Moments 1
By Darla Bracken fridarla19@yahoo.com
At the special request of the Parmer County Historical Commission in celebration of our county’s centennial this year, welcome to a series of articles about the history of Parmer County written for the Farwell State Line Tribune and the Friona Star. For those of you who do not know me, I serve as the Director of the Friona Public Library since 1985. I hope you will enjoy exploring Parmer County’s history with me. DB
Parmer County, for any newcomers we may have, lies in the Panhandle of Texas bordered on the west by the state of New Mexico’s Curry County, on the north by Deaf Smith County, on the south by Bailey County and Lamb County and on the east by Castro County. We live on what is considered the High Plains of Texas at 34 degrees 33’ north latitude and 102 degrees 47’ west longitude at the county’s center and 85 southwest of Amarillo and 35 east of Clovis, New Mexico.
Our county is 859 square miles of rolling level plains covered by sandy, clay and loam soils which have proven to very fertile especially when watered by the huge Ogallala Aquifer. A sea of native grass lands grew here when the area was home to the Indian and the buffalo. It is now mostly cultivated producing abundant corn, milo, cotton, soybeans and wheat along with various vegetable crops and has included crops as diverse as sugarbeets and sunflowers.
We range in elevation from 3,800 to 4,202 feet above sea level on the Caprock Escarpment which gives us both our high winds and our cool summer nights. Running Water Draw, a flood-prone but mostly dry creek, runs across the county from the northwest to the southeast. Two smaller draws, Frio Draw and Catfish Draw, also run through the county. Our average rainfall is 17 ½ inches and our temperature ranges from a minimum of 21 degrees in January to a maximum of 92 degrees in July and an average growing season of 183 days a year.
The County was named for an early Texas settler and veteran of the Texas Revolution as well as a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Martin Parmer. He was also nicknamed the ‘ring-tailed panther’ because of his exploits in Missouri. The area was isolated and unsettled early on but may have been part of the area explored by the Jose Mares Expedition when they were searching for a shorter route from Sante Fe to San Antonio in 1787. Apaches were probably the original inhabitants until the arrival of the Kiowas and the Comanches in 1700. These Indians of the Plains lived here until the Red River War in 1874 when they were defeated and removed to Indian Territory.
Parmer County was carved out of the Bexar District in 1876, but no settlement occurred until 1882. In January 1882 the Capitol Syndicate was hired to build a state capitol building in exchange for over 3 million acres in the Panhandle creating one of the world’s largest cattle ranches, the famous XIT Ranch. From a population of 7 in 1890 to 34 in 1900, most of the actual settlement occurred after the XIT was sold in 1904. 150,000 acres of the XIT was in Parmer County. Cattle have always hugely outnumbered people in our county from 13,675 in 1900 to the 100,000 plus in feedyard operations as well as our 10 dairy operations in the county today.
The Pecos and Northern Texas Railroad built a branch line in 1898 that would eventually run 85 miles from Amarillo to the Texas-New Mexico border. Switches, or shipping points, quickly sprang up along the route that year including: Parmerton, as a Capitol Syndicate townsite and model farm and later the first county seat, as well as Black, Frio and Bovina. Farwell, was established in 1904 and surveyed in 1905 as a headquarters for sales of the XIT Ranchlands. For legal purposes, Parmer County was assigned first to Oldham and later Deaf Smith County. On May 7, 1907 Parmer County’s government was legally established. In 1913 another branch railroad line was built from Farwell to Lubbock and became part of the Sante Fe Railroad. By the early 1920s State Road 33, now Highway 60, was built across the county connecting Farwell, Bovina, and Friona to Hereford, Canyon and Amarillo.
According to the Handbook of Texas: “By 1930 the county included 818 farms and ranches with 100,000 acres of sorghum, 11,000 acres in corn, 2,500 acres in wheat and 4,500 acres in cotton—62,000 chickens and 15,375 cattle.” 255,000 dozens of eggs were sold by local farmers that year. By the 1950s when irrigation began from the immense Ogallala Aquifer, a surge in crop production and population resulted. In 2002 there were 660 farms and ranches with 576,461 acres and our county is one of the leading counties in Texas in farm income. Parmer County has historically voted Democratic from 1908 to 1956 except when they voted for Hoover in 1928 and Eisenhower in 1952. From 1960 to 2004 they have backed Republican candidates with the exception of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Jimmy Carter in 1976.
In 2000, 10,016 people were living in Parmer County; Farwell had 1,364; Friona 3,854; Bovina 1,874; Lazbuddie 248; Lariat 100; Oklahoma Lane 25; Black 100 and Rhea 98.