Site of Epworth
Hale Center, Hale County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1883 - 1892) (1 1/4 miles southwest) First settlement in county. Established as a post office in 1884 by Horatio Graves of New York, a Methodist minister. Then only county resident, he planned to found religious colony here; named place for Epworth, England, birthplace of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Graves carried the mail from Estacado; also sold supplies to settlers and XIT Ranch cowboys. In 1891 he moved his post office several miles and started New Epworth; but drouth caused site to be abandoned in 1893. The residents joined with those of Hale City to found Hale Center. (1971)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Epworth was Hale County's first settlement, born in 1884 when Methodist minister Horatio Graves of New York established a post office and dreamed of founding a religious colony on the high plains. He named it for Epworth, England, birthplace of Methodism's founder John Wesley, and carried the mail while selling supplies to settlers and XIT Ranch cowboys. Drought forced the site's abandonment by 1893, and its people helped found nearby Hale Center.
Why it matters
Epworth's brief life is a classic Plains ghost-town story, where a founder's vision met the hard limits of drought on the frontier.
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Related people
- · Horatio Graves
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
J. Frank Norfleet
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J. Frank Norfleet rose from a ranch hand with little schooling to a Panhandle cattleman whose holdings grew to 20,000 acres, and a short-line railroad town briefly bore his name before competition and thin finances killed it. In 1919 a swindle cost him his savings, and rather than accept the loss he spent nearly five years chasing the con men across North America and the Caribbean, an odyssey he later put into a book. His dogged manhunt made him a folk figure of frontier justice.
Nils Akeson
Hale Center, TX
Swedish-born Nils Akeson came to the thinly settled Texas Panhandle from Iowa in the late 1880s and helped found the town of Hale Center as an officer of its townsite company. He rode for the legendary XIT Ranch, served as postmaster, opened the town's first store, and helped bring the Santa Fe Railroad through in 1909. As mayor, land developer, and school trustee, he shaped nearly every institution of the young town.
First Baptist Church of Hale Center
Hale Center, TX
Organized religion on the High Plains of Hale County dates to 1883, when Methodist minister Horatio Graves and his family became the area's first permanent settlers and made their home a school, gathering place, and union church. As the settlements of Epworth and Hale City merged into Hale Center, twelve worshippers organized the Hale City Missionary Baptist Church in 1891 under the Rev. I.B. Kimbrough, meeting in schoolhouses until their own sanctuary was finished in 1908. The congregation grew alongside the town it helped anchor.
Ranching and Farming in Hale County
Hale Center, TX
When pioneers reached the High Plains of Hale County in the 1880s, land was cheap but life was brutal — many families lived in dugouts and hauled supplies from Colorado City until the railroad arrived. Cattle roamed free range across huge spreads like Col. C.C. Slaughter's Circle Ranch until barbed wire and land sales carved the open country into farms. The transition from cattle to crops was hard, and the Dust Bowl and Depression tested every family who stayed. Irrigation after World War II finally turned the region into a farming empire, with cotton as king.