Floyd County

Floydada, TX

By the 18th century the Comanche had made the canyons and plains of what became Floyd County their stronghold, dominating trade and warfare across Texas after pushing rival tribes south. In October 1871, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led U.S. cavalry, guided by Tonkawa scouts, against the Kotsoteka and Quahadi bands who refused reservation life. In Blanco Canyon, Quanah Parker's warriors struck first and drove off the soldiers' horses; the fighting wounded both Mackenzie and Lieutenant Carter, and though the campaign frustrated the army, it began the destruction of Comanche power on the Southern Plains.

Floydada, TX

Between 1540 and 1542, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led a vast expedition—more than a thousand people and thousands of animals—north from Mexico chasing rumors of golden cities. Their exact path across the southern plains has long puzzled historians, since surviving accounts are brief and contradictory. In the spring of 1541 the company camped in a wide canyon, and chain mail, crossbow points, and other European artifacts later unearthed around Blanco Canyon helped archaeologists confirm that Coronado passed this way.

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.

Floydada, TX

Oregon native Fred Zimmerman came to the Texas Panhandle in 1916 and built a long career farming and ranching across Floyd and Deaf Smith counties. In 1930 he hired Wichita Falls architect Ray C. Arnhold to design this stuccoed brick house, a striking example of Pueblo Revival style with hand-hewn beams, vigas, and columns. The home stands as a distinctive expression of Southwestern architecture on the flat High Plains.