Gaines County
Seminole, Gaines County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Created August 21, 1876. Organized October 24, 1905. Named for James Gaines. Born in Virginia in 1779. Established a ferry across the Sabine River in 1819, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, member of the Congress of the Republic. Gold lured him to California where he died. A country of cattle, oil and farming. Seminole, the county seat.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Created in 1876 and finally organized in 1905, Gaines County honors James Gaines, a Virginia-born pioneer who ran a ferry across the Sabine River in 1819, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and served in the Republic's Congress before dying in the California gold fields. The county grew into a land of cattle, oil, and farming, with Seminole as its seat. Its name links the wide-open plains of West Texas to the earliest days of Texas independence.
Why it matters
It ties a remote West Texas ranching and oil county back to the founding generation of the Texas Republic.
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Related people
- · James Gaines
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Seminole
Seminole, TX
Founded and named county seat in 1905 when Gaines County organized, Seminole took its name from the nearby Seminole Wells watering places and grew slowly around its first store, post office and 1906 courthouse. The arrival of the Midland & Northwestern Railroad in 1918, followed by highways and oil, transformed the sleepy trading point into a farming and petroleum hub.
Simpson Hotel
Seagraves, TX
When the railroad town of Seagraves was platted in 1917, Alice Jenkins built this two-story lodging as the Hotel Texan. R.P. and Emma Simpson, who first owned it in the early 1920s, bought it back in 1927 and reopened it under their own name. With its stucco exterior and simple detailing, the Simpson Hotel typified the modest hotels that served travelers in early twentieth-century West Texas until it closed in 1974.
Midland and Northwestern Railroad
Andrews, TX
Chartered in 1916 by David Fasken's Midland Farms Company, the Midland and Northwestern ran sixty-five miles of standard-gauge track from Midland toward Seminole to ship cattle and lure settlers to the plains. It was a shoestring operation—an engine borrowed from the Texas and Pacific, aging equipment, and crews said to shoot coyotes from the cab to break the monotony. Flash floods that washed away its crossties helped finish it off, and the line was abandoned in 1923 as unprofitable and poorly located.
Site of Mail Relay Station
Brownfield, TX
By 1903 the French family had built a two-story home on the West Texas plains that became a working waypoint of the freight economy. Teamsters hauling goods from the Texas & Pacific Railroad, along with cattle drovers passing through, found a campground, water, hot meals, and a horse pen here. From 1905 the home also served as a stop on the mail route linking Lamesa through Brownfield to Gomez, until the mail was rerouted and the service ended in 1910.