Slaton Volunteer Fire Department
Slaton, Lubbock County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Santa Fe Railroad established Slaton in 1911. In 1919, residents established a bucket brigade to help fight fires. Alex DeLong served as fire chief of the group, which used chemical tanks and buckets of water drawn from wells to extinguish fires. The following year, the city began work on a water system and fire mains, and in 1922 the city bought is first fire truck. The volunteer fire department grew over the years in manpower and equipment, operating first from City Hall and then from its own fire station beginning in 1928. Today, the firefighters serve Slaton as well as surrounding communities. (2005)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Santa Fe Railroad laid out Slaton on the West Texas plains in 1911, and by 1919 residents had organized a bucket brigade to fight fires, drawing water from wells to fill chemical tanks and pails. Chief Alex DeLong led the early volunteers until the city built a water system and fire mains and bought its first fire truck in 1922. The department grew from a corner of City Hall into its own station by 1928.
Why it matters
The rise of a volunteer fire department mirrors the maturing of a raw railroad town into an organized community able to protect itself, a story repeated across the settling of the West Texas plains.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Alex DeLong
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Slaton
Slaton, TX
Slaton owes its very existence to the Santa Fe Railroad. When the Pecos and Northern Texas branch reached the South Plains in 1911, banker O. L. Slaton — who had helped secure the right-of-way — lent his name to the brand-new townsite, which opened for business only a month after its first lots sold. As a railroad division point complete with a Harvey House, roundhouse, and machine shops, Slaton boomed almost overnight into a farming and ranching hub.
Englewood Cemetery
Slaton, TX
Representing the Santa Fe Railroad, W.B. Storey, Jr. bought the future townsite of Slaton on April 15, 1911, with plans for a roundhouse, switch lines, depot, and Harvey House that would make it a hub of West Texas rail traffic. Rail workers and settlers filled the town so quickly that it incorporated in 1912, the same year residents opened this cemetery with the burial of an infant. Among its thousands of graves are unmarked burials in a potter's field and veterans of wars dating to the Civil War.
Ransom Canyon
Lubbock, TX
Part of the larger Yellow House Canyon, this gorge drew Spanish explorers perhaps as early as the 1540s and long sheltered Jumano, Apache, and Comanche peoples with its walls, springs, timber, and game. In the late 1700s New Mexican traders called Comancheros came to barter with the Plains tribes, and their practice of demanding ransom for captives held here gave the canyon its name. Buffalo hunters and great ranches followed in the 1800s, and after generations of cattle raising the canyon was platted as a lake village in 1965.
V-8 Ranch
Posey, TX
Tucked into a bend of the Brazos, this 1,500-acre spread holds the old headquarters of the sprawling IOA ranch, a fourteen-by-thirty-mile block of open range established just as the free-range cattle boom collapsed in the mid-1880s. Over the decades the land passed through lawsuits, a sheriff's sale, and foreclosures until partners Sam Arnett and George Benson bought a piece in 1939 and renamed it V-8 Ranch — a nod to the Ford V-8 engine and their Ford dealership. Some of its stucco and stone buildings rank among the oldest ranch structures in Lubbock County.