New Moore
O'Donnell, Lynn County, Texas
Marker Inscription
New Moore was a rural farming community established on the site of the Singleton Slash L Ranch in 1924. Samuel F. Singleton came to Texas in the 1870s. He met Marion Virgil ‘Pap’ Brownfield and they settled sixteen sections of land along the present-day Lynn County/Terry County line in 1896. Brownfield and Singleton eventually split, and Singleton retained the Lynn County portion. In 1898, Singleton purchased the thirty-section Slash L Ranch. He now had 50 sections of land that he ranched. When Singleton died in 1924 his family put up the ranch for sale and W. McCarty Moore from Dallas bought 17,000 acres from the Singletons. He divided the land into quarter sections and sold it to families looking for cheap land. The old Singleton headquarters home and stock pens were purchased by Frank Rogers and this location became known as “New Moore.” In 1924, McCarty more built the Slash L School on the west side of the land known as the Marshall Place, a one-room structure without water or electricity. A new schoolhouse was later authorized and built at New Moore, across from the Frank Rogers home. This was called the New Moore School. In 1928, a newer modern brick school building was built one mile north of New Moore. The social life of New Moore residents revolved around the school, the general store, the church and the gin. The Great Depression was followed by the Dust Bowl of the thirties and finally the horrible drought of 1953 which left the families of the community struggling. The final blow to the community was the closing of the New Moore School in 1953. Families started leaving New Moore to move to urban areas, close to schools, churches and commerce.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
New Moore rose in 1924 on the old Singleton Slash L Ranch, after a Dallas buyer carved 17,000 acres into quarter sections and sold them cheap to families hungry for land. Life in the little farming community turned on its schools, general store, church, and cotton gin, but the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the crushing drought of 1953 wore the settlers down. When the New Moore School closed that same year, families drifted toward the cities and the community faded away.
Why it matters
New Moore's brief life and quiet death trace the whole arc of the South Plains land boom and the Dust Bowl that emptied so many hopeful farming towns across the American West.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
New Moore belongs to the South Plains of West Texas, a country that in the late 1800s was still wide-open ranch land and by the 1920s was being sliced into farms. The transformation was deliberate: big ranches were broken up and sold cheap to families hungry for a place of their own, and small farming communities sprouted almost overnight around a school, a store, a church, and a cotton gin.
When New Moore was founded in 1924, the country was booming and land buyers were optimistic. But this stretch of Texas sits in a semi-arid belt where rainfall is never guaranteed, and the same flat, plowed fields that made farming possible would, within a decade, make disaster possible too. This is the setting for one of the hardest sequences in American rural history.
The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and a devastating drought in 1953 fell on communities like this one in succession. Understanding New Moore means holding both halves of the story at once: the hope of the 1920s land boom and the slow, grinding erosion of that hope through decades of hard weather and hard times.
People & events
The land's first chapter belonged to Samuel F. Singleton, who came to Texas in the 1870s and, with a partner named Marion Virgil Brownfield, settled a large block of land along what is now the Lynn County and Terry County line in 1896. When the partners split, Singleton kept the Lynn County portion, and by adding the thirty-section Slash L Ranch he built up a spread of some fifty sections that he ranched for decades.
Singleton's death in 1924 ended the ranching era and opened the farming one. His family sold the ranch, and a Dallas buyer, W. McCarty Moore, purchased seventeen thousand acres, divided it into quarter sections, and sold it to families looking for cheap land. Frank Rogers bought the old Singleton headquarters home and stock pens, and that spot became known as New Moore, a new farming community rising on the bones of an old ranch.
Life here revolved around its schools. Moore first built the one-room Slash L School, without water or electricity, then a New Moore School across from the Rogers home, and by 1928 a modern brick schoolhouse a mile north. Around the school clustered the general store, the church, and the gin, the four pillars of a plains community. Then came the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and finally the brutal drought of 1953, the same year the New Moore School closed. With the school gone, families began leaving for the cities and their schools, churches, and jobs, and the community faded.
Its place in the American story
New Moore is a near-perfect small-scale model of the whole South Plains land boom and bust, and through it, of a national experience. Across the American West in the early twentieth century, ranches were subdivided and sold to farmers on a wave of optimism, and thousands of tiny communities were born on the promise that rain and hard work would be enough. New Moore lived that promise and its limits.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is one of the defining American environmental catastrophes, a disaster of plowed-up grassland, drought, and wind that drove families off the land and into the nation's memory. New Moore endured it, then endured the 1950s drought that many old-timers considered even worse, a one-two blow that broke the back of countless farming towns.
The closing of the school as the final blow is the truest detail of all. In rural America, the schoolhouse was the community, and its loss almost always meant the end. New Moore's quiet disappearance is repeated in the empty townsites scattered across the Great Plains, each one a reminder that not every hopeful place survives, and that the map is dotted with towns that gave their all and still could not hold on.
If you visit
New Moore today is a ghost town, and visiting one asks a different kind of attention than visiting a living place. There are no ticket booths and no crowds, only the marker, the wide South Plains horizon, and whatever traces of the old community the land still holds. Come ready to read absence: the outline of where a school, a store, a church, and a gin once stood at the center of daily life.
Stand still and let the openness work on you. This is dryland farming country, and the very emptiness that makes it feel lonely is the point of the story, because it was drought and dust on exactly this kind of exposed ground that emptied the town. The wind you feel is the same force that carried the soil away in the 1930s.
New Moore pairs naturally with a broader drive through the Lynn County and Terry County farm country, where working farms and fading townsites sit side by side. Treat it as a place for reflection on a quiet road trip, a chance to stand where a community once put all its hope into the ground and to remember the families who tried.
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
- · Samuel F. Singleton
- · W. McCarty Moore
- · Frank Rogers
Related events
- · Dust Bowl
- · Drought of 1953
Themes & tags
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