Irwin Ranch House
Andrews, Andrews County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Only building remaining in old Shafter Lake, first settlement in Andrews County and at one time its largest town. Built 1908. Concrete blocks, hand pressed from sand of Shafter Lake, are the original frame. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1967
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Irwin Ranch House is the last building left of Shafter Lake, once the largest town in Andrews County and its first real settlement. Built in 1908, its frame is made of concrete blocks hand-pressed from sand taken straight out of the dry lakebed. When the town faded, this lone structure remained to mark where a West Texas boomlet had briefly stood.
Why it matters
It is a tangible relic of the ghost towns that dotted the West Texas plains, where settlements rose and vanished with the fortunes of water, rail, and land.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Shafter Lake Townsite
Andrews, TX
Platted in 1908, Shafter Lake was the first town in still-unorganized Andrews County, growing up around a water trough that served ranchers and freighters hauling between New Mexico and Texas. It took its name from the lake charted in Colonel William R. Shafter's 1875 survey, part of the campaigns that opened the Permian Basin to Anglo settlement. When the 1910 organization vote made Andrews the county seat, the town simply picked up and moved there, leaving Shafter Lake to fade away.
Shafter Lake Cemetery
Frankel City, TX
Just after the turn of the twentieth century, a burial ground took shape on the south bank of Shafter Lake, near a settlement that has since vanished from the map. It took its name from Colonel William R. Shafter, who had led a military expedition across this stretch of West Texas in 1875. The oldest legible stones date to 1909, and the once-neglected plot — now down to a dozen known graves — holds ranchers and travelers who died far from any town.
Whalen Lake School
Frankel City, TX
Two miles south of this spot, one of Andrews County's first schools opened in 1907 on land donated by Mrs. M. B. Dillard, near the edge of Whalen Lake. Built by Joe and Jake Mathis, the one-room school taught the children of homesteaders who were "proving up" their claims by living on the land for three years. It closed in 1910 and the building was moved once most settlers had fulfilled their claims and departed.
Andrews County
Frankel City, TX
Andrews County was created by the Texas legislature in 1876 and finally organized in 1910, its wide plains among the last parts of Texas to be settled. It honors Richard Andrews, remembered as the first man to fall in the Texas Revolution, killed at the Battle of Concepción near San Antonio on October 28, 1835. His name carried into the far West Texas frontier the memory of the fight for Texas independence.