Lubbock County
Lubbock, Lubbock County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Young and Bexar territories Created August 21, 1876 Organized March 10, 1891 Named in honor of Colonel Thomas S. Lubbock 1817 - 1862 Member of the New Orleans Greys at the storming of Bexar, commander of a company in the Santa Fe Expedition, member of the Somervell Expedition, co-organizer of the famous Terry's Texas Rangers, 1861. County seat, Lubbock
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Created in 1876 and organized in 1891, Lubbock County honors Colonel Thomas S. Lubbock (1817-1862), a soldier of the Texas Revolution and Republic. Lubbock marched with the New Orleans Greys at the storming of Bexar, joined the ill-fated Santa Fe and Somervell expeditions, and in 1861 helped organize the famous Terry's Texas Rangers before his death. The county he named became the anchor of the South Plains.
Why it matters
Lubbock's namesake ties the great agricultural county of the South Plains to the founding generation of Texas soldiers who fought from the Revolution through the Confederacy.
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Related people
- · Thomas S. Lubbock
Related events
- · Storming of Bexar
- · Santa Fe Expedition
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Yellowhouse Canyon
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Yellowhouse Canyon was known to Spanish explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries and described by traveler Albert Pike in 1832, long before Anglo settlement reached the Llano Estacado. It was here in 1877 that white buffalo hunters clashed with the Native peoples who had long ranged these plains—remembered on the marker as the last such battle in Lubbock County. The canyon stands as a threshold between the era of the free plains tribes and the settlement that displaced them.
Idalou Cemetery
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As farming families broke the open prairie of the South Plains in the early 20th century, John William Turner, Jr. and his wife Mary Alice set aside two acres of their land as a burial ground in 1921 — its first grave a homemade marker for an infant nephew. A cemetery association formed by 1928, and decades of donated land and volunteer workdays shaped the site's curbed plots, upright shoulder stones, and native prairie plantings. It endures as a record of the generations who built Idalou.
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