Hale County

Plainview, TX

Largely self-taught, Jeff Williams reached Hale County in 1896 and took up surveying in 1902, later working on the 1909 resurvey of the vast XIT Ranch. He served as county surveyor in both Potter and Hale counties across more than half a century, dividing ranch lands, plotting roads and townsites, and settling boundary disputes. His work helped open the South Plains of Texas to settlement.

Plainview, TX

Austin-born and educated at the Texas Military Institute, Rawleigh Porteus Smyth rose to brigadier general after service in the Spanish-American War. But his deepest mark on Texas was made with a surveyor's chain: in 1887 he ran the boundaries of the great South Plains ranches and platted the towns of Plainview, Happy, Tulia, and Kress. As a state legislator in 1897 he wrote laws to aid Plains settlers, and as a tireless irrigation advocate he helped turn the dry High Plains into farmland.

Plainview, TX

Edwin Lowden Lowe, born in Mississippi, studied law and served in the Arkansas legislature before heading to Texas in the 1880s, losing his wife along the way as the wagon train halted at Buffalo Gap. Joining his friend Z. T. Maxwell at Hackberry Groves, each man donated land to establish the county seat that became Plainview. Lowe served as the town's first postmaster and helped set it on its feet.

Plainview, TX

Twin hackberry groves once stood here, a landmark on an 1870s trail traveled by buffalo hunters, surveyors, and lawmen across the treeless South Plains. In the mid-1880s sheep rancher Zachary Taylor Maxwell and former Arkansas legislator Edwin L. Lowe staked adjoining claims and had a surveyor plat a town square from their land. Ranchers scoffed that nothing would ever be built, but settlers arrived, Lowe became first postmaster in 1887, and when Hale County organized in 1888 the new town of Plainview became county seat.