Ozona-Barnhart Trap Company
Ozona, Crockett County, Texas
Marker Inscription
By the 1920s many ranchers in Crockett County had fenced their land, preventing their neighbors from driving sheep and cattle to the railroad shipping point in Barnhart (23 miles north of here). A solution to the problem was offered by the Ozona-Barnhart Trap Co., which was organized in Ozona in 1924. By buying or leasing land for trails, traps (small pastures), pens, and water wells, the company established a corridor through which ranchers could drive their livestock to the railroad without crossing their neighbor's fences or destroying his grass supply. The main trail extended about 34 miles, from south of Ozona to Barnhart, with branch lines throughout the county. The McNutt traps (2 miles northwest), with 1340 acres of pasture, were the hub of the trail. Sale of stock to area ranchmen financed the enterprise, and operating expenses were handled by a charge per head of livestock for services used. The O. - B. Trap Co. saved the ranching industry at a time when it was the only important business in Crockett County. The need for the trail dwindled with the rise of truck transportation in the 1930s, but drives were still held until the 1950s. The O. - B. Trap Co. now leases its land for grazing or gas production.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
By the 1920s, barbed-wire fencing across Crockett County had blocked ranchers from driving their sheep and cattle to the railhead at Barnhart. Organized in Ozona in 1924, the Ozona-Barnhart Trap Company solved the problem by buying and leasing land for a 34-mile corridor of trails, small pastures called "traps," pens, and water wells, letting drovers move stock without crossing a neighbor's fence. The trail rescued the county's ranching economy until trucking made it obsolete in the following decades.
Why it matters
The company is a vivid example of how the closing of the open range with barbed wire forced ranchers to invent new ways to keep the great livestock drives alive.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John H. Reagan
Big Lake, TX
As a congressman in the 1870s and 1880s, John H. Reagan sponsored the bill that created the Interstate Commerce Commission, then resigned from the U.S. Senate in 1891 to lead the newly formed Texas Railroad Commission modeled on it. Charged first with regulating railway shipping rates, the Commission grew over the following decades to oversee pipelines, then oil and gas conservation — authority that let Texas discipline the enormous East Texas oil fields and, in World War II, keep the Allies supplied with fuel.
City of Big Lake
Big Lake, TX
Big Lake took its name from a rain-fed depression that was once the only fresh water between the Concho River and Fort Stockton — a campsite for Native peoples, traders, and cattle drivers before it became the largest dry lake in Texas. The Orient Land Company platted the town along the railroad, and it grew from a stockpen and grocery in 1911 to the seat of Reagan County by 1925. Oil and gas later made it a regional energy center.
Town of Texon
Big Lake, TX
For generations travelers found this stretch of West Texas arid and unwelcoming, and the surrounding lands — given to the University of Texas in 1876 — were leased out for cattle. Everything changed when driller Carl Cromwell brought in Santa Rita No. 1 in 1923, the first great oil gusher of the Permian Basin. The company town of Texon rose the next year to house the workers, growing to some 2,000 residents with stores, a hospital, a theater, and a celebrated baseball team, until the operation wound down and the town closed in 1962.
Orient-Santa Fe Depot
San Angelo, TX
Built in 1909–10, this was the grandest depot of the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway, entrepreneur Arthur Stilwell's audacious scheme to run 1,600 miles from Kansas City to a Mexican Pacific port—a line never fully completed. San Angelo beat out Sweetwater to become a major station and the railroad's state headquarters, and after the 1920s West Texas oil boom the Santa Fe absorbed the KCM&O in 1928. Citizens saved the two-story, tile-roofed building from demolition in 1989, rehabilitating it as a senior center and railroad museum.