Sheep and Goat Industry in Texas

🏛️The era

The rolling limestone country of the Edwards Plateau, around San Angelo in west-central Texas, turned out to be nearly ideal for an animal that most people don't picture when they imagine the Texas range: the sheep, and alongside it the goat. The land, the dry climate, and the tough native vegetation suited these grazers in ways they did not always suit cattle.

The roots run deep. Spanish explorers first brought sheep into the Southwest in the 1500s, and the Spanish missions leaned on the animals for both food and clothing. That long Spanish and Mexican inheritance — including the hardy churro sheep — became the raw material later ranchers would build upon.

The great expansion came in the second half of the nineteenth century, the era of Reconstruction and Gilded Age growth that pushed American settlement and commerce westward. New markets, abundant land, and improved animals turned a scattered practice into a booming regional industry, one that would carry into the Progressive and modern eras and make this corner of Texas a national center of wool and mohair.

👥People & events

The story runs through a handful of figures who pushed the industry forward. In 1853, Col. W. W. Haupt brought the first Angora goats to Texas — animals prized for the beauty and strength of their mohair, a fiber that would become a signature product of the region.

A few years later came the man most associated with modern sheep ranching in Texas. From the late 1850s into the 1860s, George Wilkins Kendall not only improved his own flocks but championed the whole enterprise, spreading glowing reports of its promise and drawing others into the business. He was among the first to crossbreed the coarse-wooled Mexican churro with the fine-wooled merino brought by European settlers — a practical bit of animal husbandry aimed at producing a better, more marketable fleece.

After 1870 the industry boomed, but never easily. Ranchers on the plateau contended with disease, predators, poisonous plants, and the recurring droughts of a dry land, fighting each of these to build and hold their flocks.

The support continued into modern times. The San Angelo Research and Extension Center, established in 1969 through the efforts of Gen. Earl Rudder — then president of the Texas A&M System — put scientific research to work on behalf of the industry's continued health and prosperity.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

When Americans picture the western livestock frontier, they usually see cattle and cowboys. The sheep and goat country of the Edwards Plateau tells the other half of that story — a reminder that the western range economy was built on wool and mohair as well as beef, and that these quieter industries shaped the fortunes of whole regions.

The crossbreeding of Old World and New World animals here is a small emblem of a larger American pattern: the blending of Spanish, Mexican, and European agricultural traditions into something distinctly western. Kendall's mixing of churro and merino was, in its way, the frontier turning inherited stock into a purpose-built American product.

And the arc from Spanish mission flocks to a mid-twentieth-century research center shows how a folk practice matured into a modern, science-supported industry. That Texas grew into the nation's leading producer of sheep and goats, with San Angelo as the great market for the animals and their fiber, marks this landscape as a genuine capital of an American industry.

🧭If you visit

San Angelo wears its wool-and-mohair heritage openly, and this marker is a good place to start reading it. Stand in the wide plateau country and notice the land itself — the dry air, the limestone soil, the low tough brush. This is the terrain the marker credits for the whole story, and seeing it makes the history make sense.

As you travel the region, keep an eye out for the physical remnants of the trade: old wool warehouses, stock pens, and the market infrastructure of a town that became the meeting point for ranchers and buyers. San Angelo's identity as a wool and mohair center is not a museum piece but a working inheritance.

This stop pairs well with a broader west Texas road trip, where the distances are long and the ranching country stretches to the horizon. Let it reframe the landscape for you — not just cattle country, but the home range of an industry built on fleece, fought for against drought and predator, and still central to this stretch of Texas today.