Oklahoma Lane
Farwell, Parmer County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Oklahoma Lane Community, named for the many area settlers who came from that state, was originally part of the XIT Tanch. Families began to settle here around 1915 when the Capitol Reservation Lands Company began to sell XIT ranch land. Most residents in the area were employed in agricultural and ranching activities. As many young families moved here, schools became necessary. The Sunnyside and Knox schools, which later consolidated into the Oklahoma School, served the early residents. By the 1920s, residents began Methodist and Baptist churches, and in 1925, the Capitol Lane Syndicate established a cemetery. Today, Oklahoma Lanes continues to be a tightly-knit, rural community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carved from the storied XIT Ranch, the Oklahoma Lane community took its name from the many settlers who arrived from that neighboring state beginning around 1915, when the Capitol Reservation Lands Company started selling off ranch land. Farming and ranching families streamed in, and with children came schools — Sunnyside and Knox, later merged into the Oklahoma School. Methodist and Baptist churches and a 1925 cemetery rounded out community life.
Why it matters
Oklahoma Lane illustrates how the breakup of the huge Panhandle ranches drew a wave of family farmers who built tight-knit rural communities from scratch.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Harden A. Douglass
Muleshoe vicinity, TX
Harden A. Douglass came to the newly settling plains of West Texas in 1904, part of the wave of homesteaders who filled Bailey County in the early twentieth century. When the county formally organized in 1919 he was chosen its first sheriff and tax collector, an office he held for more than a decade during the raw frontier years of ranching and dryland farming. His long tenure helped bring order and civic structure to a county still finding its footing.
Bailey County Cemetery
Muleshoe vicinity, TX
When Mariah 'Aunt Rye' Long died in 1918, Emil and Anna Wellsandt gave a parcel of their land for a public burying ground—and it filled quickly, many of the first graves belonging to victims of that year's influenza epidemic. A cemetery association formed at once, and a 'Hill-Top' section was later set aside for the county's indigent dead. After decades of neglect and vandalism the association reorganized in 1996 to preserve the resting place of Bailey County's pioneers and veterans.
Parmer County
Farwell, TX
Parmer County was created in 1876 and named for Martin Parmer, the 'Ringtailed Panther' who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Most of its land was first held by the vast XIT Ranch, granted to the Capitol Syndicate in payment for building the Texas Capitol, and in 1890 the county's population numbered only 70. When the railroad arrived in 1904 and the syndicate began selling land, settlers streamed in to carve out small farms, and Farwell became the county seat.
Olivet Cemetery
Farwell, TX
The English-financed Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company — the syndicate behind the immense XIT Ranch — deeded ground for Olivet Cemetery in 1908, making it Farwell's first burial place. Among its earliest graves is XIT manager John Armstrong, shot by cattle thieves while loading stock at Bovina, and the cemetery holds the plot of the Hassell family, a mother and eight children murdered in 1926. Roughly a hundred interments include veterans reaching back to the Civil War.