Crosbyton
Crosbyton, Crosby County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded 1908 on "cutting grounds" of C.B. Livestock Company which built a school, supply store, railroad and inn to encourage settlers. By 1911, had 1,000 citizens; was county seat. Today is center of rich irrigated farm land. Home of Pioneer Museum. Gateway to White River Dam. (1966)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Crosbyton is a textbook example of the company-planned town, a common engine of early-20th-century settlement across the American West.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Crosby County Courthouses
Crosbyton, TX
Crosby County's seat wandered across the South Plains before settling down. It began in 1879 at Estacado, a Quaker colony where county offices worked out of dugouts, shacks, and wagons until the first courthouse rose in 1888. The seat jumped to Emma in 1890, then to Crosbyton after the Crosbyton-South Plains Railroad bypassed Emma in 1910 — and the present courthouse followed in 1914.
Julian M. Bassett
Crosbyton, TX
In the early 1900s the flat, treeless expanse of the Texas South Plains was being carved into ranches and townsites as promoters raced to attract buyers and rail connections. Julian M. Bassett, a New York-born son of Texas migrants, helped run the C. B. Livestock Company and, to spur land sales, had the townsite of Crosbyton platted in 1907. His backing of the Crosbyton South Plains Rail Line helped the young town win the county seat in 1911, and he set aside this ground as a public cemetery.
City of Ralls
Ralls, TX
Ralls owes its existence to John R. Ralls, a Georgia-born settler who moved West in the 1880s and gave land for a townsite, free lots for its churches, acreage for its school, and even offered 2,000 acres to lure Texas Technological College. After settling litigation with a rival townsite company, he secured a railroad station in 1916, the guarantee of the town's survival. The city was incorporated in 1922, just after its founder's death.
John R. Ralls Building
Ralls, TX
When the railroad bypassed nearby Emma and cut instead across John R. Ralls's land, he founded a new town in its place and donated ground for homesites, the square, the school, and every church. This bank building was the grandest of the two-plus blocks of business houses he raised between 1915 and 1919 as the town took shape.