Site of the Home of Oliver Loving in 1855
Oran, Palo Pinto County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Site of the Home in 1855 of Oliver Loving (1813 - - 1867) First trail driver of Texas cattle - Loving Valley and a county in Texas bear his name - Erected by the State of Texas - 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This is the 1855 home site of Oliver Loving, remembered as the first man to drive Texas cattle to distant markets. In the years that followed he blazed the routes that opened the cattle-trail era before his death in 1867, and both Loving Valley and Loving County carry his name. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936.
Why it matters
Loving helped invent the long cattle drive, the enterprise that turned the post–Civil War Southwest into the cradle of the American cowboy and the beef economy.
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Related people
- · Oliver Loving
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Black Springs Cemetery
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Established for the pioneers of the Keechi Valley and the settlement of Black Springs, this burial ground holds the earliest marked grave of Mary A. Lasater (1841–1871). The land was given by Silas Adam Sheek, stepfather of the great Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, and among those buried here is Goodnight's mother, Charlotte Sheek, alongside Civil War veterans and early community leaders. It was renamed Oran Cemetery when the town took its new name in 1886.
Charles Goodnight
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In 1857 a twenty-one-year-old Charles Goodnight set up his first ranch at Black Springs on the very edge of the Comanche frontier, where cattle and danger ran together. He scouted for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War, blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail in 1866, and famously hauled his dying partner Oliver Loving's body home for burial. Later he founded the panhandle's first ranch, the JA, and even bred buffalo with cattle—the "cattalo."
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Founded before the Civil War around a reliable spring, Black Springs grew into the leading town of Palo Pinto County on the strength of the North Texas cattle country around it. Its story brushes against legends of the range — trail drivers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight and the frontier veteran J. J. "Jack" Cureton all figure in the area's early days. Renamed Oran in 1886 to honor Governor Oran M. Roberts, the town supported stores, churches, a school, and a railroad before fading in the 1930s and 1940s.