Struve Family Businesses

🏛️The era

In the early 1900s the South Plains of Texas were being transformed. The vast grasslands, long the domain of ranching, were opening to farming as railroads arrived and land was sold off in smaller tracts. New towns appeared along the tracks almost overnight. Abernathy, founded in 1909, was one of them.

Those towns started from nothing. Settlers needed groceries, tools, hardware, farm implements, and cloth, and the nearest established supply centers could be a long wagon ride away. The merchants who arrived early, set up shop, and stayed were as essential to a town's survival as the farmers themselves.

The years from the 1910s through the Depression tested these communities hard. Farming on the High Plains meant drought, wind, and hard times, and the 1930s brought both economic collapse and the Dust Bowl to the region. A town's businesses had to adapt, expand, and sometimes invent new trades to keep going.

This is the world the Struve family stepped into, and the one their stores helped build.

👥People & events

Fritz W. Struve came to Abernathy in 1912 from Burnet County in the Texas Hill Country. The town was only three years old. He opened a grocery store, a sensible start in a place where every family needed to eat. In 1918 his brother Ben F. Struve joined him, and the two built that single store into a family network of businesses.

The marker's list shows how far that network reached. A grocery lasted half a century, from 1912 to 1962. Hardware and farm implement businesses began in 1913 and were still running when the marker was placed in 1972. There was a dry goods store from 1918, and a tin shop that operated until 1923. Between them, the Struves could feed a farm family, outfit its house, and equip its fields.

The most surprising venture was a cheese factory, running from 1929 to 1951. The marker notes it was unique in the region and produced an average of 1,800 pounds of cheese a day. That's a striking figure for a small plains town. It turned local farm production into a manufactured product and launched the business the same year the Great Depression began.

Fritz Struve's role went beyond commerce. In 1924 Abernathy elected him its first mayor, and he served three terms. Fritz died in 1959 and Ben in 1947, but the businesses they founded carried on for years after them.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Struve story is a local version of something that happened all across the American West. When new farm towns rose on the plains, family merchants were often the ones who made them work. They brought in supplies, extended credit, created jobs, and frequently ended up leading local government, as Fritz Struve did.

Their businesses also show how the plains economy changed over time. A tin shop that closed in the 1920s, a cheese factory that rose and fell over two decades, and implement and hardware stores that lasted for generations trace the shift from frontier settlement to modern farming, with its growing demand for machinery.

The cheese factory in particular is a reminder that small towns weren't only consumers of goods made elsewhere. With the right idea and local resources, they could manufacture, too, adding value close to home.

🧭If you visit

Abernathy sits in the flat, wide-open farm country north of Lubbock, where the horizon seems to go on forever and grain elevators are the tallest landmarks. Standing at the marker, it's easy to imagine the town in its first years: a few storefronts along the railroad and farm wagons coming in for supplies.

As you walk the downtown streets, think about how much of daily life once passed through one family's doors. A farmer might buy flour at the grocery, nails at the hardware store, a plow at the implement dealer, and fabric at the dry goods counter, all from the Struves.

Abernathy fits easily into a South Plains road trip. Lubbock is close by, with museums devoted to ranching and farm life that give wider context to stories like this one. Take the back roads to get a feel for the agricultural landscape that made these towns possible.