De Leon Peanut Company

🏛️The era

For most of the late nineteenth century, the farms of Comanche County ran on cotton. The crop was the cash in a farmer's pocket and the reason the wagons rolled into town at harvest. Across the South, a whole way of life depended on that one plant.

Then, in the early 1900s, a run of blows hit all at once. Disastrous weather in 1908 and 1909 wrecked harvests. A national economic downturn squeezed prices and credit. And the Mexican boll weevil arrived, a small beetle that had crossed into Texas from Mexico in the 1890s and was moving steadily north and east, eating cotton bolls from the inside. By 1914 the infestation in Comanche County was severe.

Farmers here faced a choice many Southern growers would face over the next twenty years: keep betting on cotton, or change. In this part of Central Texas, sandy soils suited another crop very well. That crop was the peanut, and the farmers who switched found it paid better.

👥People & events

The trouble with peanuts, at first, was distance. A farmer could grow them, but processing meant shipping the crop to Fort Worth, and freight and middlemen ate into every load. N. T. Haskins saw an opening. In 1912 he organized the De Leon Peanut Company so the county's growers could sell and process their crop at home.

He brought local businessmen onto the first board of directors: R. W. Higginbotham, W. H. Williams, B. T. Higginbotham, Jr., J. B. Wilson, A. E. Hampton, and W. E. Lowe. These were neighbors putting their money behind a crop that was still new to many of the farmers around them.

The timing was very good. By 1914 peanuts had become the county's leading cash crop, and the company expanded to keep up. In 1917 it finished a six-story main building, which towered over a small farm town. Soon the plant could take in as many as ten railroad carloads of peanuts a day.

The company also lived through the economic crisis of the 1920s, a hard decade for American agriculture well before the Great Depression. It stayed a fixture of the community for decades, until a national company bought it in 1967. Along the way De Leon earned its proud nickname: "The Peanut Capital of the World."

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The boll weevil changed the agricultural map of the American South. As it spread, it forced farmers in region after region to stop relying on a single crop and try something new. Peanuts were one of the best-known answers. In the same era, scientists such as George Washington Carver were promoting the peanut as a soil-friendly crop with many uses.

De Leon shows that national story at the scale of one county. Because a disaster struck, local people built new infrastructure: a processing plant, rail shipments, and jobs. They kept the profits close to home instead of sending them up the line to a big city.

The arc also echoes later American farm history. A local enterprise grows strong, survives hard times, and is finally absorbed by a national company as agriculture consolidates. Small towns all over the country followed some version of that path in the twentieth century.

🧭If you visit

De Leon is a small Comanche County town in the gently rolling farm country southwest of Fort Worth. As you drive in, look at the fields around you and picture them changing from cotton white to peanut green in a single generation.

At the marker, try to imagine a six-story industrial building rising above a farm town in 1917, with rail cars lined up to unload. Then picture the rhythm of harvest season, when wagons and trucks full of peanuts converged on one plant.

De Leon pairs naturally with other stops in Central Texas farm country, and it suits a back-roads drive where the point is to see how rural Texas actually made its living. Kids might enjoy the simple idea at the heart of this place: a whole town changed its future by switching what it planted.