Estacado Cemetery
Lorenzo, Lubbock County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1878 Paris Cox (1846-1888), an Indiana Quaker, visited this area with a group of buffalo hunters. Attracted by the abundance of cheap farm land, he returned to Indiana and began advertising his plans for a Quaker colony here. Although the first colonists who arrived in 1879 were discouraged by a severe winter, other settlers, including those of various religious beliefs, soon moved to the area. The settlement was first called Maryetta in honor of Cox's wife, but in 1886 it was renamed Estacado, part of the Spanish term for the Staked Plains, Llano Estacado. When Crosby County was formally organized in 1886, Estacado was chosen as the first county seat. A courthouse was built two years later. The center of a vast agricultural area, Estacado continued to prosper until the 1890s when the county seat was moved to Emma and many of the early colonists began migrating to other areas. An important reminder of Estacado's pioneers is this community cemetery, the burial site of many early settlers and area leaders, including Paris Cox. Now part of Lubbock County, it serves as a historic record of the individuals who opened the Texas Plains and led in the region's agricultural development. (1982)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1878 Paris Cox, an Indiana Quaker, crossed the Llano Estacado with buffalo hunters and saw a place for a colony; he went home to advertise cheap farmland and drew settlers to the high plains. The community—first called Maryetta for his wife, then renamed Estacado—became the first county seat of Crosby County and even built a courthouse before the seat moved away in the 1890s. This cemetery holds Cox and many of the pioneers who first broke the sod of the Staked Plains.
Why it matters
Estacado marks one of the earliest attempts to farm the forbidding Llano Estacado, a proving ground for the agricultural conquest of the South Plains that would later make the region a cotton empire.
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Related people
- · Paris Cox
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Estacado
Lorenzo, TX
In 1879 a colony of English Quakers led by Isaac Paris Cox settled the high plains of West Texas, founding a town first called Marietta for Cox's wife Mary. Renamed Estacado when Crosby County was organized in 1886, the idealistic religious colony struggled against the harsh, isolated conditions of the Llano Estacado and had disintegrated by 1893, with remaining families relocating to Galveston County by 1895.
Roots of the Catholic Faith in West Texas
Floydada, TX
The Catholic faith first reached this stretch of the South Plains with Coronado's 1540s search for the fabled cities of gold, when his men camped in nearby Blanco Canyon. Over the centuries the region passed through Mexican and then American church jurisdictions, and by the early 1900s priests were ministering to a growing flock of settlers and immigrants drawn by cheap land. Waves of newcomers from Mexico — during the Revolution and later through the Bracero labor program — fueled decades of church-building, culminating in the creation of the Diocese of Lubbock in 1983.
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.
Snyder Commnuity
Plainview, TX
Mennonite minister and farmer Peter B. Snyder, hunting cheap land, bought property in Hale County in 1906 and urged fellow Mennonites to join him, and by 1907–08 families were arriving by train and raising houses after first camping in tents. They built a one-room schoolhouse open to all faiths for lessons, worship, and socials. But dust storms, prairie fires, hail, and the brutal droughts of 1915–16 broke the colony, and most—including Snyder—had left by the mid-1920s.