Progressive & Modern Era

Friona's First Barber Shop

Friona, Parmer County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Friona was established in 1906 and by 1926, various businesses were established. Jack Anderson began his barber career at the XIT Ranch in 1903. He settled in Friona where he opened the town’s first barbershop in 1926 and cut hair for generations. In 1951, a young Lee Gibson went to work for Mr. Anderson as a shoeshiner and general caretaker. After graduating barber school, Gibson began working at Jack’s in 1963 as a barber. They worked together until Mr. Anderson’s death in 1969. Mr. Gibson bought the shop that same year and ran the business for several decades. The barbershop remains one of the few structurally-unchanged historic buildings from early days of Friona’s history. (2016)

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Established in 1906, the Panhandle town of Friona had gathered a cluster of businesses by the 1920s. Jack Anderson, who first learned the barber's trade on the storied XIT Ranch in 1903, opened the town's first barbershop in 1926 and cut hair for generations. A young Lee Gibson joined in 1951 as a shoeshiner, became a barber, and bought the shop in 1969, running it for decades in one of Friona's few structurally unchanged early buildings.

Why it matters

The barbershop preserves the everyday commercial and social fabric of a young Panhandle town and the trades that knit its community together.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

Friona sits out on the flat, wide Texas Panhandle, a country of enormous horizons and big weather. The town was established in 1906, part of a wave of new communities that sprang up across the High Plains in the early twentieth century as railroads pushed through and settlers followed to break the sod and build main streets from scratch.

By the 1920s, Friona had done what young towns did when they meant to last: it had gathered a cluster of businesses. A town's early commercial life — its stores, its trades, its everyday services — was the proof that it was becoming a real community rather than a way station, and the arrival of essential trades marked a kind of coming of age.

The region around Friona also carried the memory of the great open-range era that had only just closed. The Panhandle had been the country of vast cattle operations, and the men who had worked those ranches were now, many of them, settling into the growing towns and bringing their skills with them.

People & events

One of those men was Jack Anderson. He began his barber career in 1903 on the XIT Ranch — one of the most storied cattle operations in Texas history — and later settled in Friona, where in 1926 he opened the town's first barbershop. There he cut hair for generations, becoming one of those fixtures every small town has: the man whose chair every boy and every working father eventually sat in.

In 1951, a young Lee Gibson came to work for Mr. Anderson, starting at the bottom as a shoeshiner and general caretaker. It was an old and honorable path into the trade — learning the shop from the floor up. Gibson went on to barber school, and in 1963 he returned to work at Jack's as a full barber.

The two men worked side by side until Mr. Anderson's death in 1969. That same year, Gibson bought the shop and carried it on for several decades more — one trade, two hands, passed from teacher to apprentice and kept alive across most of a century. The building that housed them remains one of the few structurally unchanged survivors from Friona's early days.

Its place in the American story

It is easy to reserve history for battlefields and capitols, but the American story is also written in barbershops. Across the country, the small-town barbershop was more than a place for a haircut — it was a gathering spot, a source of news and talk, a room where a community's men of every station shared the same waiting bench. To trace one shop across the twentieth century is to trace the life of the town around it.

The thread back to the XIT Ranch gives this ordinary shop an extraordinary lineage. The vast open-range operations of the Panhandle belong to the mythic heart of the American West, and here that world connects directly to a settled main street — the same hands that learned a trade in the era of great ranches later served a growing town.

There is national meaning, too, in the simple act of one tradesman training his successor. The passing of a craft from master to apprentice, and of a business from one steady hand to the next, is how skills and institutions endure. A town keeps its character not only through grand events but through continuities exactly like this one.

If you visit

Come to Friona ready to appreciate the small and the enduring. This is Panhandle country — level, spacious, shaped by wind and distance — and the survival of an early, structurally unchanged building is itself worth pausing over in a landscape where so much has been rebuilt or lost.

Stand where the town's first barbershop stood and imagine the decades of ordinary life that moved through it: the talk, the regulars, the slow rhythm of a place where nearly everyone eventually passed through the door. That accumulation of everyday moments is the history here.

As a road-trip stop, this marker rewards travelers who love the texture of real small towns over marquee attractions. It fits naturally into any journey across the Panhandle's ranching and railroad heritage — a reminder that a community's story lives in its trades and its longtime hands as much as in anything larger.

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

· Jack Anderson
· Lee Gibson

Themes & tags

Industry & InventionLandmark

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