R. L. McMullan Home

🏛️The era

In the 1880s, Scurry County sat on the edge of the Texas South Plains, a region only recently opened to permanent settlement. The great buffalo herds had been hunted nearly to extinction in the 1870s, and the Comanche and other Plains peoples had been forced onto reservations. In their place came ranchers, and then farmers, and with them the first small towns.

Snyder grew from those rough beginnings. Early frontier towns in this region were tiny, isolated, and short on everything, from lumber to doctors. Many settlers lived in dugouts or half-dugouts, homes partly cut into the earth, because wood was scarce and the soil offered some protection from heat, cold, and wind.

At the same time, the wider nation was in the middle of a technological revolution. The telephone had been invented in the 1870s and was spreading rapidly through American cities. Getting that kind of technology to a small West Texas town was a real event.

👥People & events

This house began in 1885 as a modest two-room home built by Dr. A. O. Scarborough. On a frontier where medical help could be very far away, a local doctor was an important figure, and his house would have been a known place in the community.

In 1889 the house was moved to its present site and enlarged. Moving a house was not unusual in frontier towns, where buildings were valuable and lumber hard to come by; it was often easier to relocate a house than to build a new one.

Two local firsts happened here. Snyder's first telephone was installed in this house, bringing a brand-new technology to a town still close to its frontier days. And in the yard stood the town's first greenhouse, a clever frontier invention: a half-dugout topped with glass. It combined the earth-sheltered building style settlers already knew with the new possibility of growing plants through the cold months.

In 1902 the house was bought by R. L. McMullan, and his family preserved it. In 1966 it was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story of how modern technology reached the American frontier is often told through railroads and telegraph lines. But it also happened in individual homes, one telephone and one clever invention at a time. This house captures that moment, when a small West Texas town began connecting to the wider world.

The glass-topped half-dugout greenhouse is a wonderful example of frontier ingenuity. Settlers on the plains adapted what they had, earth and a little glass, to solve a real problem. That practical, make-do spirit is one of the defining traits of American settlement in the West.

The house also shows how ordinary buildings become history. It is not a mansion or a courthouse, just a small family home. Yet because one family kept and cared for it, it now preserves a record of Snyder's earliest days that might otherwise have been lost.

🧭If you visit

This is a modest home, so do not expect grandeur. What makes it special is imagining the moment when Snyder's first telephone rang here, or picturing the unusual glass-covered half-dugout greenhouse in the yard.

If the house is privately held, enjoy it from the street and respect the privacy of anyone who may live there. The marker itself tells the key story, and the house's small scale is part of the lesson: this is how many frontier families actually lived.

Snyder makes a good stop on a drive across the South Plains and Rolling Plains of West Texas. The wide skies and open land around town help you understand why settlers here built into the earth and why a telephone line to the outside world mattered so much.

Combine this stop with other markers in Scurry County to trace the town's growth from frontier outpost to modern community.