Farmer Community

🏛️The era

In the late 1880s the High Plains of West Texas were among the last great open stretches of the American frontier. For most of the century the region had been the domain of the Comanche and of the vast buffalo herds. Those herds were wiped out in the 1870s, and the Comanche were forced onto reservations. Big cattle ranches moved in quickly behind them.

Farming families soon followed the cattlemen. They came to test whether this wide, flat, wind-scoured country could grow crops. Settlement at Farmer began in 1887, during that first wave of homesteading on the plains of Crosby County. These settlers faced long distances, scarce wood and water, and the open question of whether the land would reward them.

Railroads made the difference. Towns like Colorado City and Amarillo grew up as rail and trade centers in the 1880s and became anchors for the scattered farms around them. The fact that friends in those towns helped pay for Farmer's early school says a lot about how isolated plains communities leaned on each other across great distances.

The school district was created in 1893, only six years after settlement began. That was typical of the era. For families who had just arrived, a schoolhouse was often among the first things they built, right after shelter, and frequently before a proper church.

👥People & events

Farmer's story is mostly a story of neighbors. The marker doesn't name the founding families. Its details still sketch a lively community: a school built partly through gifts, and a Methodist congregation organized around 1890, with Baptists following in 1891. Presbyterians, the Church of Christ, Seventh-day Adventists and others later joined them. Several faiths sharing a small farming community was common on the plains, where churches often shared buildings or preachers before they could support their own.

The social clubs on the marker paint an even warmer picture. There was a P.T.A. and a baseball club. There were "singsongs," the community singing gatherings that brought rural families together. There was a Forty-two Club, named for the domino game so beloved in Texas that it's sometimes called the state's national game. And there was a Farmer Community Reunion, where people who had scattered could come home again.

One of Farmer's daughters went on to the Governor's Mansion. Ima Smith grew up here and later married Preston Smith, who served as Governor of Texas from 1969 to 1973. The marker was placed in 1970, while she was First Lady. That gave this small community a proud moment of recognition on the state stage.

Mrs. Smith's story ties Farmer to a broader West Texas pattern. Plenty of the region's leaders came out of farm communities like this one, carrying the values of church, school and neighborliness with them into public life.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Farmer is one small example of a huge national story: the closing of the American frontier and the settling of the Great Plains. In the decades after the Civil War, families pushed onto grasslands that earlier generations had called unfit for farming. They built a new agricultural heartland one homestead and one schoolhouse at a time.

The pattern at Farmer repeated across the plains from the Dakotas to Texas: settlers first, then a school, then churches, then clubs and reunions. These small communities supplied the social glue that made isolated farm life bearable. Their one- and two-room schools gave generations of rural children their start.

Many of these communities later faded as farms consolidated, roads improved, and schools merged into larger districts. Markers like this one keep a record of places that once had their own name, school and teams. They also remind us how much of American life was built at this local, neighbor-to-neighbor scale.

🧭If you visit

The country around Cone in Crosby County is classic South Plains landscape. You'll find wide-open cotton fields, a huge sky, and horizons that seem to go on forever. Coming here shows you just how far apart early settlers lived, and why a school or a Saturday ball game meant so much to them.

At the marker, try picturing the community it describes: a schoolhouse, small churches, families pulling in for a singsong or a game of Forty-two. Very little of that may still be visible, so the marker serves as your window into what used to be here.

Farmer fits easily into a drive across the South Plains from Lubbock, which is not far to the southwest. Pair it with other Crosby County sites, or with the dramatic caprock escarpment to the east, where the flat plains suddenly drop away into rough canyon country. Bring a sense of quiet. This is a place for imagining, not sightseeing.