Ropesville Resettlement Project
Ropesville, Hockley County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) was enacted in 1933 as part of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program to aid families during the country's Great Depression. The Rural Rehabilitation Division of that agency began in 1934 to work specifically with the problems of the nation's farm families. The Ropesville Resettlement Program was one of 78 FERA-approved projects to help farmers re-establish themselves. Initiated by a committee out of Lubbock (20 mi. NE), this project was located on land near the already-established town of Ropesville. Federal money was used to construct homes, wells, and farm buildings. The first 33 families, chosen for their initiative and willingness to work, settled into their new homes in 1936. By the end of 1939, a total of 77 families were working and living in the project. A community manager, assisted by a home economist, provided guidance to participants in the Ropesville program. The project ended officially in 1943, when the Ropesville Farms came under individual ownership. A community building, constructed for the people of the farms in 1939, was moved to this site in 1959. (1985)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
At the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal sought to rescue struggling farm families, and the Ropesville Resettlement Project was one of 78 federal experiments to give them a fresh start. Beginning in 1936, federal money built homes, wells, and barns on the South Plains, and eventually 77 carefully chosen families farmed the land under a community manager until they gained individual ownership in 1943.
Why it matters
Ropesville shows how New Deal social engineering reshaped rural life and tried to keep Depression-era farmers on the land.
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Related events
- · The New Deal
- · Great Depression
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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When homesteaders began breaking the Hockley County prairie in 1902, their growing families soon needed a school. In 1909 parents hauled lumber roughly a hundred miles by wagon from Big Spring, donated their labor, and raised a one-room schoolhouse named Primrose for a wild prairie flower. Classes opened that December for children of a handful of pioneer families, and the building doubled as polling place, church, and meeting hall until the nearby town of Ropesville drew the community away.
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Ropesville owes its existence to a 1917 deal in which rancher I.L. Ellwood traded 85 acres to the Santa Fe railroad for a depot on his Spade Ranch, complete with the rope corrals that gave the town its name. In its early years there was no local cemetery, so the dead had to be carried to distant towns — until injured rancher Lee Cowan asked in 1933 to be buried on a knoll west of town, prompting Ellwood to donate an acre and create Ropesville Cemetery. A cemetery association soon formed, and the grounds grew over the following decades.
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Isaac Ellwood, who made a fortune as one of the inventors and manufacturers of barbed wire, bought this vast South Plains range in 1889 from the veteran cattlemen D.H. and J.W. Snyder. Branded with the "Spade," the ranch was first stocked with calves from Ellwood's southern Renderbrook Spring holdings and eventually stretched fifty-four miles across several Panhandle counties before farmland sales moved its headquarters in the 1920s. Ellwood's descendants still own and operate it today.
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