Lipscomb County
Higgins, Lipscomb County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Young and Bexar territories: Created, August 21, 1876 Organized June 6, 1887 Named in honor of Abner S. Lipscomb, 1789-1856. Secretary of State in President Lamar's cabinet member of the Constitutional Convention, 1845; associate justice of the First Supreme Court of Texas. Lipscomb, the county seat
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carved from Young and Bexar territories, Lipscomb County was created in 1876 and organized in 1887 as settlement pushed into the northeastern Texas Panhandle. It honors Abner S. Lipscomb (1789–1856), a jurist and statesman who served as secretary of state in President Lamar's cabinet, sat in the 1845 Constitutional Convention, and became an associate justice of the first Supreme Court of Texas.
Why it matters
The county's founding marks the organization of frontier Texas into governed land, while its namesake links it to the founding generation of Texas statehood.
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Related people
- · Abner S. Lipscomb
- · Mirabeau B. Lamar
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Higgins Cemetery
Higgins, TX
Higgins was platted in 1887 by E. C. Gray and the Patton brothers, who had bought land betting the Santa Fe Railroad would build through it—and it did, growing the town into a farming, ranching, and oil community named for a railroad stockholder. Gray deeded its cemetery in 1900, though burials had begun earlier, the oldest marked graves those of two children who died in 1889. Among the interred are a pioneer dentist-sheriff, early friends of humorist Will Rogers, and the forty-five townspeople killed when a tornado destroyed much of Higgins on April 9, 1947.
Will Rogers
Higgins, TX
One of America's most beloved humorists first sharpened the rope tricks that made him famous as a young cowboy on the Little Robe Ranch near Higgins. Will Rogers had left school in 1898 after some pranks and drifted into Texas, forming a lifelong friendship with his employer's son before joining a wild west show in 1902 and rising to national fame. His life ended in 1935 in a plane crash alongside aviator Wiley Post during a pioneering flight around the globe.
Lipscomb Cemetery
Lipscomb, TX
The Texas Legislature created Lipscomb County in 1876 for the early statesman Abner Lipscomb, and about a decade later J. W. Arthur built a sod-and-wood store and post office that gave the county seat its name. The community formally established its cemetery by 1887, when the infant Fred Mehlhop was buried in its first marked grave, though older unmarked burials may lie nearby. County judges, officials, teachers, ranchers, and farmers rest here, a tie to the settlers who first developed the northeastern Panhandle.
St. John's Lutheran Church Cemetery
Lipscomb, TX
Among the earliest homesteaders of Lipscomb County were German-Russians—Germans whose families had farmed the Russian empire before coming to America—including Jacob and Amalia Koch. They belonged to St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church, founded by these settlers in 1914, and by 1916 the Koch family let the congregation use their land for burials, formally deeding it in 1950. The first grave, baby Hildegard Schilling in January 1916, began a cemetery that still links the county to its German-Russian heritage.