Simon Peter Hawkins
Burkburnett, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1849 - 1930) A pioneer leader in Wichita County, Simon Peter Hawkins was born in Crockett County, Tenn. He married Sara A. Hardin (1852-1937) in 1869. They had eight children. With his brother-in-law John G. Hardin, Hawkins moved his family to Johnson County, Texas, in 1875. Seeking better land, the men found lush grass in present Wichita County and settled their families on the north side of Gilbert Creek. After fire destroyed the Hawkins' dugout home, the family moved about 1/4 mile. South of this site, Hawkins signed a petition for establishing Wichita County. He voted in the first county election and served on the first county grand jury. He helped organize the First Baptist Church, the first Masonic Lodge and the first school in this area. Hardin bought a store patronized by Indians and cowboys. The cowboys called the colony Nesterville. When the post office was established in 1882, it was renamed Gilbert. Hawkins served as mail carrier, making two trips weekly to Wichita Falls. After the railroad arrived, settlers in Gilbert moved about one mile to the new townsite of Burkburnett. When oil discoveries turned Burkburnett into a boomtown, Hawkins and his wife moved to Mineral Wells. He died there and was buried in the Burkburnett Cemetery. (1978)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Tennessee-born Simon Peter Hawkins brought his family to present Wichita County in 1875 in search of good grass, settling along Gilbert Creek in a colony cowboys nicknamed Nesterville. He signed the petition to organize the county, voted in its first election, sat on its first grand jury, and helped found the area's first Baptist church, Masonic lodge, and school. When the railroad shifted settlement to the new town of Burkburnett, the community he helped build moved with it.
Why it matters
Hawkins's life maps the whole arc of frontier county-building — from open range and dugout homes to elections, churches, and railroad boomtowns.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The stretch of North Texas that became Wichita County was, in the 1870s, still frontier in the fullest sense — open grassland at the far edge of Anglo-American settlement, more familiar to cattle and to the Plains tribes than to farmers. It was land measured in grass and water rather than in fences and deeds, and the people who came to it came looking for exactly that: room to run stock and start over.
This was the era just after the Civil War, when Reconstruction was reshaping the South and thousands of families were pushing west in search of land they could not find or afford back home. Simon Peter Hawkins, born in Tennessee in 1849, was one of them. He married Sara Hardin in 1869, and within a few years the growing family joined that great westward drift.
When Hawkins and his brother-in-law finally settled along Gilbert Creek, they were planting themselves at the very frontier of organized society — ahead of the courthouse, ahead of the church, ahead of the railroad. Everything that makes a county a county still lay in the future, waiting to be built.
People & events
Simon Peter Hawkins came up from Tennessee by way of Johnson County, Texas, moving his family — he and Sara would raise eight children — alongside his brother-in-law John G. Hardin in 1875. The two men were looking for better land, and they found it in the lush grass of what is now Wichita County, settling their families on the north side of Gilbert Creek. When fire destroyed the Hawkins family's dugout home, they simply moved a quarter mile and kept going.
What followed reads like a checklist of frontier civic life, and Hawkins seems to have had a hand in nearly all of it. He signed the petition to organize Wichita County, voted in its first election, and sat on its first grand jury. He helped organize the area's first Baptist church, its first Masonic lodge, and its first school — the institutions that turn a scattering of homesteads into a community.
Hardin, meanwhile, kept a store patronized by both Indians and cowboys, and it was the cowboys who gave the little colony its first name: Nesterville. When a post office arrived in 1882 the place was renamed Gilbert, and Hawkins took on the job of mail carrier, riding to Wichita Falls and back twice a week. Later, when the railroad came through and drew settlement toward the new townsite of Burkburnett, the community picked up and followed. Hawkins and Sara eventually moved on to Mineral Wells after oil transformed the region, but he was brought back and buried in the Burkburnett Cemetery, in the country he had helped settle.
Its place in the American story
Hawkins's life is a compact map of how the American frontier actually became America. We often picture that process as a single dramatic moment — a land rush, a gold strike — but for most places it was the patient, unglamorous work of exactly the kind Hawkins did: signing petitions, showing up to vote, sitting on juries, founding churches and schools.
His story also captures the way settlement kept moving in response to forces larger than any one family. The colony shifted names, then shifted location when the railroad chose its route, then saw its people scatter again when oil remade the local economy. Across the West, it was the railroad and the resource boom that decided which towns thrived and which faded, and ordinary settlers reorganized their lives around those decisions.
In one man's biography, then, you can trace the whole arc of frontier county-building: open range and a dugout home at the start, a courthouse, ballot box, and pulpit in the middle, and a railroad boomtown at the end. Multiply that arc by thousands of families and you have the settling of the American West.
If you visit
This is a landmark marker set in open North Texas country near Burkburnett, and the landscape itself is part of the exhibit. Look at the land the way Hawkins and Hardin would have: not for what could be built on it, but for its grass and its water, the things that made a rancher's heart lift in 1875.
The marker rewards a slow read, because it packs a great deal of movement into a small space — a dugout that burned, a colony that changed its name, a town that moved a mile to meet the railroad. Try to hold those shifts in your mind as you stand there. The quiet ground in front of you was, in its day, a place actively being invented.
It pairs well with a visit to the Burkburnett Cemetery, where Hawkins was laid to rest, and with the town of Burkburnett itself, whose very existence is the last chapter of the story this marker begins. Together they let you follow a frontier community from open grass to established town without leaving the area.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Simon Peter Hawkins
- · Sara A. Hardin
- · John G. Hardin
Themes & tags
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