Hackberry Groves

🏛️The era

In the 1870s the Llano Estacado, the high, flat tableland of the Texas South Plains, was one of the last great open spaces in the United States. It was a sea of grass that stretched to the horizon, with almost no trees and few landmarks of any kind. For centuries it had been the hunting ground of the Comanche and other Plains peoples, and of the enormous herds of buffalo they depended on.

That world changed with startling speed. Commercial buffalo hunters swept across the southern plains in the 1870s and nearly wiped out the herds within a few years. The U.S. Army's campaigns of the mid-1870s ended Comanche control of the region, and in their wake came surveyors, lawmen, ranchers and eventually homesteaders.

By the 1880s the South Plains were being divided into ranches and claims, and settlers were organizing new counties out of what had recently been open country. In a landscape that empty, any landmark mattered, and a grove of trees could become the center of everything.

👥People & events

On the treeless plains, two groves of hackberry trees stood out like an oasis. They lined a trail that buffalo hunters, surveyors, officers of the law and early settlers all used in the 1870s, a place to find shade, rest and get your bearings. For years the land around them was public domain, and nobody claimed it.

That changed in the mid-1880s. Zachary Taylor Maxwell, a sheep rancher, staked a claim to a quarter section here. His friend Edwin L. Lowe, who had served in the Arkansas legislature, claimed the 160 acres next door. The two men had a bigger idea than farming: they wanted to build a town. They hired surveyor R. P. Smyth to lay out a public square, taking half from Maxwell's land and half from Lowe's.

Not everyone believed in the plan. Local ranchers laughed at the idea of a town out here, and one of them supposedly said he would eat everything that was ever built on the spot. But more families came and staked claims, including the Bryans, Burches, Carters, Griffins, Joneses, McClellands, Marsalises, Pendleys, Smiths and Smylies. Thornton Jones opened a store. Lowe named the town Plainview and became its first postmaster on March 18, 1887.

The founders' gamble paid off. When Hale County was organized in 1888, Plainview became the county seat. Lowe did not live to see much more: he died on July 13, 1889, and Maxwell moved away in 1892. But settlers kept arriving, drawn by the green trees and rich soil, and later leaders brought in railroad and highway connections and built the businesses and institutions that turned a scoffed-at claim into a lasting city.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Plainview's founding captures one of the final chapters of the American frontier. Within roughly fifteen years, this region went from buffalo range and Comanche hunting grounds to a surveyed county seat with a post office and a town square. Few transformations in American history happened faster.

The story also shows how towns on the Great Plains were often created by sheer determination. Places like this did not grow slowly around a river crossing or an old trading post. Individuals staked claims, hired surveyors, and willed a town into being, and then competed to win the county seat, which could decide whether a young town survived or disappeared.

And it shows how much a single landscape feature could matter. On the open plains, water, shade and a recognizable landmark were precious. The hackberry groves that guided hunters and surveyors also drew the first settlers, making them a quiet but real force in where people chose to live. The settlement of the plains brought tremendous change, and it came at a heavy cost to the buffalo and to the Native peoples who had lived here before.

🧭If you visit

Stand here and try to picture the scene the marker describes: mile after mile of flat grassland, and then two stands of hackberry trees rising out of it. The original groves are gone, but the contrast they once made explains why this exact spot became a town. For travelers who have just driven across the wide-open South Plains, it is easy to understand why these trees meant so much.

Plainview today is a regional hub in the heart of Texas farm country, so this marker is a good reminder that the city's busy streets started out as two neighboring quarter-section claims and a surveyed square. Take a look around the town's historic center and imagine the first store, the first post office, and the doubters who said nothing would ever be built here.

Plainview sits along the main route between Lubbock and Amarillo, which makes it an easy stop on a Panhandle and South Plains road trip. Pair this marker with others in the region that tell the story of buffalo hunters, ranching and the founding of plains towns, and you will get a vivid sense of how quickly this landscape was transformed.