Site of Thurber Big Lake and Dairy

🏛️The era

In the late 1880s, coal was the fuel of industrial America. It powered locomotives, factories and steamships, and railroads crossing the treeless Texas plains needed a steady supply of it. When workable coal was found in the rolling country of Erath County, west of Fort Worth, investors moved quickly to mine it.

The result was Thurber, a company town in the fullest sense. The Texas and Pacific Coal Company owned the land, the houses, the stores and nearly everything else, and the town grew rapidly as miners arrived to work underground. Many were immigrants from Europe, and together they made Thurber one of the most diverse communities in Texas.

A town that grows that fast runs into basic problems, and water is the first of them. This is dry, rolling country with no large natural lake nearby. If Thurber was going to hold thousands of workers and families, the company would have to build its own water supply, and that is the story this marker tells.

👥People & events

The company's first answer came in 1891, when it built a 20-acre reservoir south of the townsite. Residents called it the "Little Lake." It soon proved too small for a community that kept growing, and five years later the company built something far larger: a 150-acre "Big Lake," about a mile southeast of town, on this site.

The man behind the company was R. D. Hunter, president of the Texas and Pacific Coal Company and the dominant figure in Thurber's early years. Under Hunter the Big Lake became more than a reservoir. He organized a hunting and fishing club there for company executives and staff, a place where the managers of a hard-driving industrial operation could relax on the water.

The lake worked, too. Its water irrigated company-owned farmland in the valley below and supplied the nearby Thurber Dairy, so the company that dug the town's coal also helped grow and supply its food. The dairy's twin silos outlasted much of the town itself and stood as landmarks for decades after.

Thurber's story as a whole ended with a sharp decline. As railroads switched from coal to oil in the early twentieth century, demand for Thurber's coal fell away, and the once-bustling town emptied out. The lake, the farmland and the memory of the dairy are part of what remains.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Thurber belongs to a distinctly American chapter: the company town. From New England mill villages to Appalachian coal camps to western mining towns, companies in this era often built entire communities from scratch, controlling housing, stores, utilities and even leisure. The Big Lake and Dairy show how complete that control could be. The company engineered the water, farmed the land, supplied the milk and organized the recreation.

That all-encompassing model had two sides. It could provide services a raw frontier settlement could not, like a reliable water supply. It also concentrated enormous power over workers' daily lives in a single employer. Tensions over that power ran through labor history nationwide, and Thurber was no exception; the town eventually became known as a strongly unionized community.

The lake's social life is telling as well. A hunting and fishing club for executives and staff was a small version of the class divisions of the Gilded Age: the same body of water that supplied the miners' town also served as a retreat for those who managed it.

🧭If you visit

Thurber lies along the interstate corridor between Fort Worth and Abilene, and it is one of the most evocative ghost towns in Texas. Today little survives of the once-crowded coal town, but its most famous survivor, a tall brick smokestack, is easy to spot from the highway and makes a natural first stop.

From there, the Big Lake marker helps you read the landscape. Look out over the valley and picture irrigated company fields below the dam, a working dairy nearby, and managers heading out to hunt and fish on the water. The quiet of the place today makes the contrast with its busy past all the more striking.

Thurber pairs well with a drive across north-central Texas. Give yourself time to wander, read the markers around the old townsite, and imagine a company town that, for a few decades, built nearly everything it needed, right down to its own lake.