Follett
Follett, Lipscomb County, Texas
Marker Inscription
A gateway to Texas Panhandle's "Golden Spread". Founded as "Ivanhoe", on a site across state line, in Oklahoma. Town moved twice to locate on a railroad. Situated here in 1917, and renamed for Horace Follett, railroad surveyor. Economy based on wheat, cattle, grain sorghums and (since 1950's) oil and gas production. (1967)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Follett started life as "Ivanhoe" just across the line in Oklahoma, then chased the railroad, moving twice before settling on the Texas side in 1917. Renamed for a railroad surveyor, it became a gateway to the Panhandle's wheat-and-cattle "Golden Spread." Farming and ranching carried the town until oil and gas arrived in the 1950s.
Why it matters
Follett is a textbook Plains town whose very location was dictated by the rails, willing to pick up and move rather than be left off the line.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early twentieth century, the northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle was some of the last open country in the state to fill with farms and towns. Ranching had come first, on vast stretches of shortgrass prairie. Then the railroads arrived, and with them came homesteaders, grain elevators, and the hope that this high, windy land could become a breadbasket.
On the Great Plains, the railroad decided which towns lived and which died. A settlement left a few miles off the line had no way to ship its wheat or cattle and no easy way to receive lumber, coal, or mail. Whole towns were jacked up onto skids and dragged across the prairie to meet the tracks. Some of them crossed state lines to do it. Follett's story belongs to this restless era of moving towns.
Follett settled at its present site in 1917, while the United States was entering the First World War. Wartime demand for wheat pushed the plow across the southern Plains during those years. That expansion helped turn the region into the farm country later promoted as the "Golden Spread," and it set the stage for the hard lessons of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
People & events
The town didn't start out as Follett, or even in Texas. It began as Ivanhoe, a romantic name borrowed from Sir Walter Scott's famous novel, on a site just across the line in Oklahoma. Like many early Plains settlements, it was a gamble on where the future would run. When it became clear the railroad would pass elsewhere, the townspeople made a very Plains decision: if the tracks wouldn't come to them, they would go to the tracks.
They moved twice. That meant uprooting homes, stores, and the town's identity and setting them all down again. By 1917 the community had landed on the Texas side, along the railroad, and it took a new name honoring Horace Follett, a surveyor who had worked on the railroad. Surveyors were the people who laid out the line, and on the Plains, naming a town for one was a fitting tribute. His work had decided where the town could survive.
Once settled, Follett grew into what the marker calls a gateway to the Panhandle. Farmers raised wheat and grain sorghums, ranchers ran cattle, and the railroad carried it all to market. Then, beginning in the 1950s, another resource came out of the ground beneath those fields: oil and natural gas. That gave the town a second economic leg to stand on, alongside the farms and ranches.
Its place in the American story
Follett is a small but clear example of one of the great forces that shaped the American West: the railroad's power to make or unmake a community. Across Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, hundreds of towns were relocated, renamed, or abandoned depending on where the tracks were laid. Ivanhoe's journey across a state line to become Follett shows that process plainly.
The town's economy follows the arc of the southern Plains in the twentieth century. First came cattle on open range, then wheat and sorghum on plowed ground, and then oil and gas from deep below. The region's prosperity has always depended on distant markets and the rails or pipelines that reach them. So a town like Follett has always been tied to national events, from wartime grain demand to the energy economy of the postwar years.
The marker also reflects how Texans remembered themselves in the 1960s, when the state's historical marker program was expanding. Recognizing a town's founding and its "gateway" role was a way of saying that ordinary Plains communities, not just battlefields and mansions, were part of the American story.
If you visit
Follett sits in the far northeastern corner of the Panhandle, close to the Oklahoma line. Its story starts just over that border, so as you drive in, notice how near the state line is. It helps to picture a whole town packing up and crossing it.
This is big-sky country. Look out over the flat, open land and you'll see the economy the marker describes: wheat fields, grazing cattle, the tall shapes of grain elevators, and in places the equipment of oil and gas production. Elevators are often the tallest landmarks in a Plains town, and the rail line that drew the town here is the reason they stand where they do.
Follett fits well into a slow road trip across the High Plains. Combine it with other small Panhandle towns whose locations were also set by the railroads. You'll start noticing the pattern: each town is a short haul from the last, each one strung along the tracks. Take your time. The appeal here is the quiet scale of the land and the stubbornness of the people who stayed on it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Horace Follett
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fairmont Cemetery
Follett, TX
At the far northern tip of Texas—closer to six other state capitals than to Austin—Fairmont Cemetery outlasted the towns that made it. Settlers founded Ivanhoe in Oklahoma in 1901, moved it to the railroad as South Ivanhoe, then in 1917 dragged its buildings on skids across the state line to a new Santa Fe stop named Follett. The cemetery, deeded in 1910, holds its first burial the reinterred body of a mother of six killed by lightning, alongside the children of Mexican railroad workers lost to the 1918 influenza epidemic and more than a hundred military veterans.
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