Crosby County
Crosbyton, Crosby County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Young and Bexar Territories. Created August 21, 1876. Organized September 20, 1886. Named in honor of Stephen Crosby 1800-1869. Came to Texas in 1845. Commissioner of the General Land Office. County seat, Estacado, 1886. Emma, 1890. Crosbyton, since 1911.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Crosby County was created in 1876 from the Young and Bexar territories and organized a decade later in 1886, taking its name from Stephen Crosby, a Commissioner of the General Land Office who came to Texas in 1845. Its county seat migrated across the plains from Estacado in 1886 to Emma in 1890 before settling in Crosbyton in 1911. The shifting seat traces the slow settlement of the West Texas high plains.
Why it matters
The county's origins illustrate how the state carved governable units out of the vast West Texas frontier as settlers moved onto the plains.
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Related people
- · Stephen Crosby
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Crosbyton
Crosbyton, TX
Crosbyton sprang up in 1908 on the ranch lands of the C.B. Livestock Company, which deliberately built a school, store, railroad, and inn to lure homesteaders onto the West Texas plains. The strategy worked: by 1911 the town claimed a thousand residents and the county seat. Once open range, the surrounding country became rich irrigated farmland.
High Plains Pioneer Henry Clay Smith
Crosbyton, TX
Henry Clay Smith was a true High Plains pioneer — the first to open a post office, farm, break land, and drill a water well in Crosby County. When the Civil War began he was mining at Pinos Altos, New Mexico, and joined efforts to seize the gold and silver mines for the Confederacy until Indian raids and the Confederate withdrawal in 1861 closed them down. He served four years for the South and spent the rest of his life on the plains, building a rock house in 1877 now replicated in a Crosbyton museum.
Crosby County
Crosbyton, TX
This state monument honors Henry Clay Smith — "Uncle Hank" — a German-born pioneer who, with his wife Elizabeth, built the famed Rock House in 1877 and became a byword for frontier hospitality on the Texas Plains. The couple settled at Old Emma above the Cap Rock, an escarpment marking the edge of the high plains, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to them in 1936. They lie buried near the home that made their name.
Work Building
Crosbyton, TX
The C.B. Livestock Company carved the Crosbyton townsite out of its -N- range land in 1908, and this building rose in 1910 from concrete blocks cast in a dugout just a block away. It opened as the town's first meat market and has stayed in continuous use ever since. It is a modest survivor from the moment a West Texas ranch became a town.