Higginbotham Brothers and Company
Cross Plains, Callahan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
HIGGINBOTHAM BROTHERS AND COMPANY This location of the Higginbotham brothers and Co. was opened on Nov. 20, 1914 by brothers Rufus Wilson, Joseph Martin, and Bolivar Taylor, Jr. Original glass counters, cabinets, mirrors, stairways, floors and tin ceiling are still in use today. The first in the chain of general stores was opened in 1881 in de Leon by Joseph, Bolivar and brother-in-law Jeff Bartlett. Soon, combinations of brothers, relatives and friends opened other locations serving all aspects of customer needs, including undertaking. The funeral parlor was located on the north side of the cross plains store before being relocated. Today there are 34 Texas store locations which have served for 130 years. (2014)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Higginbotham brothers opened their first general store in De Leon in 1881, and over the following decades combinations of brothers, in-laws, and friends spread the name across Texas, selling everything a town needed — right down to undertaking. This Cross Plains store opened in 1914 and still keeps its original glass counters, cabinets, mirrors, tin ceiling, and floors in use. A century on, the company counted dozens of Texas locations, a rare survivor of the old-fashioned mercantile chain.
Why it matters
It preserves the world of the small-town general store — the retail hub that supplied and connected rural Texas before highways and national chains — remarkably intact.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Cross Plains store of Higginbotham Brothers and Company opened its doors in 1914, at the height of the era when the general store was the beating heart of small-town Texas. This was the Progressive and early modern age, before highways and national chains, when a rural community depended on a single well-stocked mercantile to supply nearly everything a family could need.
But the company's roots reach back further, to 1881, when the first store in the chain opened in De Leon. That was the world the Higginbothams built into: a Texas of scattered farm towns, each one needing a reliable place to buy tools, cloth, food, and hardware, and to sell or trade what the farms produced. A good general store was more than a shop — it was a lifeline, a gathering place, and often the economic anchor of the whole town.
By 1914, the family had turned that single De Leon store into a growing network across Texas. The Cross Plains location was one node in that web, built to serve a farming community in the manner of the day: everything under one roof, from the practical goods of daily life to services a family hoped it would rarely need.
People & events
The Cross Plains store opened on November 20, 1914, the work of three brothers: Rufus Wilson, Joseph Martin, and Bolivar Taylor Higginbotham Jr. Their names are worth remembering because the company's whole character grew from family. The very first store, back in 1881 in De Leon, had been opened by Joseph and Bolivar together with a brother-in-law, Jeff Bartlett — a partnership of kin that set the template for everything that followed.
From there, as the marker tells it, combinations of brothers, relatives, and friends opened location after location, each serving all aspects of a customer's needs. That phrase covered more than dry goods. It stretched, remarkably, all the way to undertaking — the funeral parlor at the Cross Plains store was located on the north side of the building before it was later relocated. In a small town, the same trusted merchant family might outfit a home and, in time, help lay a loved one to rest.
What makes this particular store extraordinary is how much of it survived. The marker records that the original glass counters, cabinets, mirrors, stairways, floors, and tin ceiling were all still in use — the actual fixtures of a 1914 mercantile, not reproductions, worn smooth by more than a century of customers.
Its place in the American story
The general store is one of the quiet institutions that built rural America. Before automobiles put distant towns within easy reach and before national retail chains blanketed the country, the local mercantile was where the community met the wider economy. It brought manufactured goods to the countryside and carried the countryside's cotton and produce out to market. To understand how rural America actually lived and shopped, you have to understand the store on the main street.
Higginbotham Brothers is a striking example because it did what few of these enterprises managed: it grew from a single frontier shop into a lasting chain while keeping its family character. When the marker was placed in 2014, the company counted dozens of Texas locations and had been in business for well over a century — a rare survivor of a business model that most of the country left behind decades ago.
That one of its early stores has kept its original fittings intact makes it a kind of accidental museum of American commerce. The counters and cabinets that served customers in 1914 preserve, better than any recreation could, the texture of everyday economic life in the small-town America of that generation.
If you visit
Step inside and let your eyes do the traveling back in time. The features to look for are the ones the marker singles out: the original glass counters and cabinets, the mirrors, the stairways, the wooden floors worn by generations of footsteps, and the pressed tin ceiling overhead. These are the genuine fixtures of a store that opened in 1914, and finding them still in daily use is the whole magic of the place.
Take a moment to picture how a store like this once worked — how nearly everything a household needed sat somewhere on these shelves and in these cabinets, and how the merchant's family knew their customers by name. The building was designed to be the town's one-stop supplier, and that ambition is written into its very layout.
For a road-tripper hunting for the authentic remnants of small-town America, this is a find worth slowing down for. It's not a reconstruction or a themed attraction but a working piece of history, a place where the world of the old-fashioned general store has quietly endured into the present.
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
- · Rufus Wilson Higginbotham
- · Joseph Martin Higginbotham
- · Bolivar Taylor Higginbotham Jr.
Themes & tags
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