Site of Lake Plainview
Plainview, Hale County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The City of Plainview, founded in the 1880s, sought agricultural supremacy for its trade area. Civic leaders pioneered irrigated farming in 1911 by boring the first of many deep water wells. In 1912, Texas Land & Development Co. installed a demonstration well near the Santa Fe Railway Depot and created Lake Plainview and a park at this site. Called Texas' largest body of water fed by a well, the lake was very popular with the public, but expensive to maintain. After fire destroyed the pump house in 1917, park and lake went back to nature. In 1977 the area again became a park. 1977
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On the arid High Plains, water was everything, and Plainview's civic leaders staked the town's future on finding it underground. In 1911 they bored the region's first deep wells, and the next year the Texas Land & Development Co. sank a demonstration well that filled Lake Plainview—billed as the largest body of water in Texas fed by a well. Popular but costly, the lake reverted to nature after a 1917 fire destroyed its pump house.
Why it matters
It marks the dawn of irrigated agriculture on the Texas High Plains, the innovation that would transform a dry grassland into one of the nation's great farming regions.
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Nearby & related markers
The Santa Fe Railroad in Plainview
Plainview, TX
Operating in the Panhandle since 1886, the Santa Fe Railroad planned around 1900 to push into the rich farmland of the South Plains. Plainview's leaders raised $75,000 to court a connection, and on December 31, 1906, the first train arrived to end the town's isolation. Land agents soon brought trainloads of prospective settlers, and a courthouse, schools, an opera house, and Wayland's new institute rose in the boom that followed.
Former Office Site of Texas Land & Development Company
Plainview, TX
Founded in 1912, the Texas Land & Development Company was an agricultural experiment on an enormous scale, drawing Eastern and European capital to develop 65,000 acres across Hale, Floyd, and Swisher counties. By pioneering irrigated and dryland farming methods on the High Plains, the company helped make the region one of the most productive in America before winding down in 1956. Its officers, farm superintendents, and even a staff historian left their mark on Panhandle agriculture.
Colonel C. C. Slaughter
Plainview, TX
Hailed as the first native-born "cattle king" of Texas, C. C. Slaughter worked cattle from boyhood and pushed his herds onto the West Texas frontier by 1856, supplying beef to the Confederacy and riding in a frontier regiment during the Civil War. Afterward he helped rescue the bankrupt state's economy by opening cattle markets, improved the Texas Longhorn with Shorthorn and Hereford bulls, and helped organize the first cattle raisers association. At his height he ranched around a million acres and became a banker and philanthropist.
Rawleigh Porteus Smyth
Plainview, TX
Austin-born and educated at the Texas Military Institute, Rawleigh Porteus Smyth rose to brigadier general after service in the Spanish-American War. But his deepest mark on Texas was made with a surveyor's chain: in 1887 he ran the boundaries of the great South Plains ranches and platted the towns of Plainview, Happy, Tulia, and Kress. As a state legislator in 1897 he wrote laws to aid Plains settlers, and as a tireless irrigation advocate he helped turn the dry High Plains into farmland.