Ghost Towns of Deaf Smith County
Hereford, Deaf Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Here as in many Texas counties, ghost towns and ghost post offices outnumber living ones. La Plata (formerly Grenada) thrived as county seat and was a major stop on New Mexico-Amarillo Road, 1880s and 90s. Its 28 houses and businesses were removed to Hereford with the county government in 1898. Ayr, which lost county seat to La Plata, 1890, had an early post office and a few frame buildings. Other nonexistent post offices include Escarbada (on XIT Ranch), 1889; Dean, 1892-99; Mirage (probably on LS Ranch), 1891-94; Kelso, 1907-1908. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Across the Texas Panhandle, the settlement map is written as much in vanished towns as in surviving ones, and Deaf Smith County is a vivid example. La Plata, once known as Grenada, was a bustling county seat and a key stop on the New Mexico–Amarillo Road in the 1880s and 1890s—until its buildings and county government were simply hauled off to Hereford in 1898. Nearby Ayr, Escarbada on the great XIT Ranch, Dean, Mirage, and Kelso each flickered into existence as post offices before fading away entirely.
Why it matters
These lost towns trace the boom-and-bust rhythm of frontier settlement, where a shifting railroad, county seat, or water source could raise a community overnight or empty it just as fast.
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Nearby & related markers
Town of Dawn
Dawn, TX
Named by hopeful pioneers who saw in it "the dawning of a new country," Dawn gained the county's second post office in 1889. Its first building was a Santa Fe Railroad boxcar pressed into service as a station house in 1905, and W.E. Neal and his sons developed the townsite in earnest in 1914 with a lumber yard, hotel, bank, and store. It settled into life as a center of the surrounding farming country.
Friona
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Friona was founded in 1898 by the vast XIT Ranch as a shipping point on the new Pecos & Northern railroad, first called Frio after a nearby draw. A land company soon launched a colonization drive, luring Midwestern settlers with promises of fertile soil and a healthful climate, and building a hotel, bank, and livery. Renamed Friona when its post office opened in 1907, the town lost a bitter county-seat fight to Farwell but grew into a regional farming center that dubbed itself the "Grain Sorghum Capital of the World."
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Parmerton began as Parmer Switch on the Pecos & Northern Texas Railroad in 1898 and grew when a model farm using the Campbell dry-farming method took root there in 1906. A townsite company laid out streets in 1907, and Parmerton briefly became the county seat with its own post office. But when nearby Farwell won the county seat later that year, residents literally packed up and moved their houses away, leaving only the railroad switch to mark the spot.
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