Lone Wolf Community
Hermleigh, Scurry County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(5 mi. N of Lone Wolf Mountain) Named for Kiowa chief whose tribe roamed area until 1870s. Community development when John Mahoney donated cemetery and school sites. A schoolhouse, erected 1901, was used also for church services. First teacher, W. F. Knowlton, had 35 pupils. Local post office was Winston (June 26, 1901-April 30, 1909). Mail later came by rural route. In 1906, D. C. Hazelwood built local store. Lone Wolf School, operated at different locations, served the community until consolidated. Cemetery (with oldest grave date 1892) continues in use as burial place for area families. (1970)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Named for the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf, whose people ranged across this stretch of West Texas until the 1870s, this community took root when settler John Mahoney donated land for a cemetery and school. A one-room schoolhouse rose in 1901, doubling as a church, and a store, post office, and scattered farms soon followed. The little settlement gradually faded as its school consolidated, but its pioneer cemetery, with graves dating to 1892, still serves area families.
Why it matters
It captures the everyday texture of frontier community-building on the Southern Plains, in country only recently passed from Kiowa hands to homesteaders.
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Related people
- · Lone Wolf
- · John Mahoney
- · W. F. Knowlton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Valley View School
Colorado City, TX
In 1905 nine men of the Lone Wolf Valley agreed to build a community school, naming it Valley View and hiring an eighteen-year-old, Aury Williams, as its first teacher. Neighbors donated the land and raised the one-room schoolhouse by hand, using it as a community center as well. It served the surrounding ranch country until 1942, when consolidation into the Loraine District ended the era of the rural one-room school.
Lone Wolf Mountain
Loraine, TX
This mountain bears the name of Lone Wolf, a Kiowa chief held as a hostage by General Custer following the Washita campaign and later released. After his son was killed, Lone Wolf vowed revenge on white settlers, and a clash occurred along the El Paso Road north of Fort Concho near this landmark. The chief died in 1879.
Ruddick Park
Colorado City, TX
This West Texas park was deeded to Colorado City in 1929 in memory of pioneers W. P. and Sarah Ruddick, but the ground it sits on carried a longer, harder history. The nearby Colorado River saw an 1840 clash between Colonel John Henry Moore's men and a Comanche village, and the creek here still bears the name of the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf; by 1880 Texas Rangers of the Frontier Battalion were stationed here against raids. When the Texas & Pacific Railroad arrived in 1881, settlers like the Quaker Ruddick—who introduced registered Jersey and Hereford cattle and raised some of Mitchell County's first cotton—poured into the region.
Comanche Village Massacre
Colorado City, TX
On the banks of the Colorado River in October 1840, a punitive expedition of ninety volunteers under Colonel John Henry Moore attacked a Comanche village, killing and capturing scores of its people and recovering hundreds of horses. Guided by seventeen Lipan Apache scouts under Chiefs Castro and Flacco, the raid came amid the bitter frontier warfare of the Republic of Texas years. It was one episode in the long, violent contest between settlers and the Comanche over the Texas plains.