Lazbuddie
Lazbuddie, Parmer County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1902, Thomas Kelly bought 55,136 acres of the capitol syndicate’s Red Tower Camp (part of the original XIT Ranch). Kelly developed the Star Ranch with thirty windmills plus bunkhouses, corrals, outbuildings and a schoolhouse. The ranch was later subdivided to form smaller ranches and farms, and the Star Ranch School building moved here. In 1924, D. Luther (Laz) Green and Andrew (Buddie) Sherley opened the Lazbuddie commissary, which became the center of a rural community. In 1926-27, Lazbuddie gained a post office, Missionary Baptist Church, and new brick schoolhouse. A Methodist Church and community cemetery began in 1928, followed by businesses, gins and a grain elevator. Lazbuddie remains an active agricultural town on the Texas high plains.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1902 Thomas Kelly bought more than 55,000 acres of the legendary XIT Ranch and built the Star Ranch, dotting the high plains with thirty windmills, corrals, and a schoolhouse. As the great ranch was carved into smaller farms, a community took root: D. Luther 'Laz' Green and Andrew 'Buddie' Sherley opened the Lazbuddie commissary in 1924, giving the town both its heart and its whimsical name. Post office, churches, schools, and grain elevators soon followed.
Why it matters
Lazbuddie shows the transformation of the vast open-range XIT Ranch into the settled farm-and-ranch communities that define the modern Texas Panhandle.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Texas high plains around Lazbuddie are famous for one thing above all: flatness. This is the Llano Estacado, a vast, treeless tableland in the Panhandle where the horizon runs unbroken in every direction and the sky feels enormous. For most of history it was open range — grand, dry, and thinly peopled.
At the turn of the twentieth century, that was beginning to change. The great open ranches that had dominated the Panhandle were being broken up and sold off, and a new kind of settlement was moving in: farms and small towns, fences and windmills, families instead of trail crews. Lazbuddie's story sits right at that hinge.
It is a Progressive-era, modern story more than a frontier one. The community took shape in the first decades of the 1900s, as the raw open plain was surveyed, subdivided, and slowly stitched into the settled agricultural country it remains today.
People & events
The land itself carries one of the most storied names in Texas ranching. In 1902 Thomas Kelly bought 55,136 acres of what had been the Capitol Syndicate's holdings — a piece of the legendary XIT Ranch. On that ground he built the Star Ranch, dotting the plains with thirty windmills to pull groundwater to the surface, along with bunkhouses, corrals, outbuildings, and a schoolhouse.
Then the great ranch began to come apart, subdivided into smaller ranches and farms — and out of that transition a town was born. The name is the charmer here, and it comes straight from two men. In 1924 D. Luther Green and Andrew Sherley opened the Lazbuddie commissary, and the town took its name from their nicknames: Laz and Buddie, joined together. That store became the center of a rural community.
What followed reads like a town assembling itself in fast motion. In 1926 and 1927 came a post office, a Missionary Baptist Church, and a new brick schoolhouse. A Methodist Church and a community cemetery began in 1928, and then businesses, cotton gins, and a grain elevator arrived. The old Star Ranch schoolhouse was even moved to the townsite — a piece of the ranch carried bodily into the new community.
Its place in the American story
Lazbuddie compresses one of the defining transformations in American history: the closing of the open range and the coming of the settled farm-and-ranch country that replaced it. The land here was part of the XIT, born of one of the great bargains in Texas history — the Capitol Syndicate famously received roughly three million Panhandle acres in exchange for building the state capitol in Austin. That an ordinary town later grew from a slice of that empire is the whole arc in miniature.
The sequence of what got built says just as much. A store, a post office, churches, a school, a cemetery, a grain elevator — that is the standard toolkit of American community-building, the institutions people raise, in roughly that order, when they mean to stay. You can watch a settlement become a town simply by reading the list.
And the ending is quietly remarkable: Lazbuddie is still here, still an active agricultural town on the high plains. Many communities born in that era faded once the ranches were gone. This one held on, turning open range into enduring farm country and keeping the story going.
If you visit
Come for the sheer openness. The high plains around Lazbuddie offer a horizon most travelers rarely see — flat, wide, and huge — and understanding that landscape is the first step to understanding the town. Every windmill and grain elevator you spot is a small human answer to all that space.
As you look around, picture the layers of history stacked on this ground: first a piece of the vast XIT empire, then the thirty-windmill Star Ranch, then a town that grew up when a store opened and gave the place both a heart and its playful name. The transformation from open range to farm country is written right into the fields.
This is working agricultural country, not a tourist stop, and that is exactly its appeal. If your road trip takes you across the Panhandle, pause here to appreciate how a settled community was built, piece by piece, on land that was once nothing but grass and sky — and how, unlike so many of its neighbors, it is still very much alive.
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
- · Thomas Kelly
- · D. Luther Green
- · Andrew Sherley
Themes & tags
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