Cowboys' Christmas Ball
Anson, Jones County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1885, M. G. Rhodes hosted a wedding party and dance at his Star Hotel in Anson. One guest was Larry Chittenden, a salesman and writer visiting his uncle in Jones County. He was so inspired by the dance held that night for the cowboys and ladies that he composed a poem commemorating the occasion, “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball.” The poem, first printed in Anson’s Texas Western Newspaper in 1890, also appeared in Chittenden’s 1893 poetry collection Ranch Berses. Over the years the poem was remembered and anthologized many times in print and song. In 1934, Leonora Barrett and Hybernia Grace revived the historic ball and its folklore. Their group performed during the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas and at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C. in 1938, when they danced on the White House lawn. As annual interest increased, the group copyrighted the event and named a board of directors for the Texas Cowboys’ Christmas Ball Association. A new venue, Pioneer Hall, was built in 1938-40 with help from the Work Projects Administration. The dance has been a three-day event since 1940, and the following year Jenne Magafan’s mural in the Anson Post Office depicted the historic “Cowboy Dance.” Chittenden’s poem records real people and ranches of 1880s Jones County, along with observations of dress and customs which influence some of the formal rules and decorum of the ball today. Ladies must wear dresses and gentlemen must check their hats, and some attendees dress in period clothing. The event draws national and international visitors, while some participants are direct descendants of those immortalized in the poem. With such 19th century dances as the grand march, waltz, cotton-eye joe, polka, Virginia Reel and Schottische, this Anson tradition helps perpetuate an important aspect of life in frontier Texas. (2009)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1885 a dance for cowboys and ladies at the Star Hotel in Anson so inspired visiting writer Larry Chittenden that he penned "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball," a poem naming real people and ranches of 1880s Jones County. Revived in the 1930s, the tradition drew national fame, even reaching the White House lawn, and settled into Pioneer Hall built with WPA help. Held every year with grand marches, waltzes, and period dress, it keeps a piece of frontier Texas alive.
Why it matters
The ball transforms a single frontier night into living folklore, one of the rare Old West customs still danced by descendants of the very people it commemorates.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the 1880s, the Texas frontier was settling into ranch country. The open range and the great cattle operations had drawn a particular kind of population — cowhands, ranch families, and the small towns that grew up to serve them — and social life had to be invented out of long distances and hard work. A dance was not a trivial thing in such a place. It was one of the rare occasions that pulled scattered people together, and it carried real weight in a community's calendar.
Anson, in Jones County, sat squarely in that world. A hotel dance there would have drawn cowboys in from the surrounding ranches and the ladies of the community, and for one night the ordinary rhythm of frontier labor gave way to music, movement, and company. This was the Reconstruction-and-Gilded-Age era on the national clock, but out here the texture of life was still very much the working West.
What makes this spot unusual is that the moment did not simply pass, as such evenings almost always do. It was witnessed by someone who wrote it down — and the writing, rather than the dance itself, is what carried the night forward into memory and eventually into an enduring tradition.
People & events
In 1885, M. G. Rhodes hosted a wedding party and dance at his Star Hotel in Anson. Among the guests was Larry Chittenden, a salesman and writer who was visiting his uncle in Jones County. Chittenden was so taken by the sight of the cowboys and ladies dancing that night that he did what a writer does with a moment worth keeping — he turned it into a poem, 'The Cowboys' Christmas Ball.'
The poem had a life of its own. It first appeared in Anson's Texas Western newspaper in 1890, and again in Chittenden's 1893 poetry collection. Over the years it was remembered, anthologized, and set to song, spreading far beyond the county where it was born. What began as one guest's impression of one evening became a piece of shared American verse.
The tradition was revived in the 1930s, when Leonora Barrett and Hybernia Grace brought the historic ball back to life. Their group performed at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas and, in 1938, at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C., where they danced on the White House lawn. As interest grew, the organizers copyrighted the event and named a board of directors for the Texas Cowboys' Christmas Ball Association. A dedicated venue, Pioneer Hall, was built between 1938 and 1940 with help from the Work Projects Administration, and the ball became a three-day event beginning in 1940. In 1941, a mural by Jenne Magafan in the Anson post office captured the historic 'Cowboy Dance' in paint.
Its place in the American story
Most of frontier daily life vanished without a trace — the ordinary evenings, the local customs, the way people actually dressed and moved. The Cowboys' Christmas Ball matters because a sliver of that world was caught before it disappeared and then deliberately kept alive. Chittenden's poem recorded real people and ranches of 1880s Jones County, along with details of dress and custom, and those observations still inform the ball's rules and decorum today.
That continuity is genuinely rare. The dances themselves — the grand march, the waltz, the cotton-eyed joe, the polka, the Virginia Reel, the Schottische — are living nineteenth-century social forms, still performed rather than merely described in a book. When ladies wear dresses and gentlemen check their hats, the community is honoring a code drawn from a specific frontier evening nearly a century and a half ago.
The reach of the tradition tells the larger story too. From a small-town hotel in Texas, the ball's fame carried to a national exposition, to the National Folk Festival, and onto the White House lawn. It is a reminder that American folklore is not only the property of the famous and the grand; sometimes it grows out of one working community's determination to remember who it was.
If you visit
The Cowboys' Christmas Ball is not a museum piece — it is still danced, as a three-day event, and that is the thing to understand before you go. If you time a visit to the ball itself, you'll find people in period clothing, the old dances called out one after another, and a decorum that comes straight from the frontier: dresses for the ladies, hats checked at the door. Some of those on the floor are direct descendants of the very people named in Chittenden's poem, which gives the evening a depth few events can match.
Even outside the event, the town wears its history. Look for Pioneer Hall, the venue raised with Work Projects Administration help at the end of the 1930s, and remember that a New Deal work program helped build a home for a nineteenth-century poem's afterlife. The post office mural of the 'Cowboy Dance' is another thread of the same story rendered in paint.
Come ready to feel a tradition rather than just read about one. The pleasure here is the sense of a single night in 1885 still echoing — in music, in steps, in the manners of a room full of people choosing to keep it going. It is the kind of stop that rewards a traveler curious about how the Old West actually amused itself, and how a community decides what is worth remembering.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Larry Chittenden
- · M. G. Rhodes
Themes & tags
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