Progressive & Modern Era

Substation No. 14

Rocksprings, Edwards County, Texas

Marker Inscription

In 1914, Edwards Plateau ranchers were in a severe drought and losing sheep and goats to poisonous plants. Ranchers B.M. Halbert, V.A. Brown, R.E. Taylor and J.B. Murrah and the newly-formed Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association proposed a local experiment station. The Texas Legislature appropriated $10,000 to establish Substation No. 14 through Texas A&M University, and citizens of Edwards and Sutton counties raised additional funds to acquire 3,462 acres of the Annie and D.B. Cusenbary Ranch midway between Rocksprings and Sonora. Since its opening in 1916, work has varied from plant research and vaccines to range conservation, watershed protection and prescribed fire. Later called the Sonora Research Station, it has contributed to the ecological, economic and social well-being of the region. (2019)

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

When a severe drought and poisonous plants ravaged Edwards Plateau flocks in 1914, ranchers and the new Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association pushed for a scientific solution. The Texas Legislature funded Substation No. 14 under Texas A&M, and local citizens raised money to buy more than 3,400 acres between Rocksprings and Sonora. Opening in 1916, the station tackled everything from plant research and animal vaccines to range conservation and prescribed fire.

Why it matters

It shows how public agricultural research helped ranchers survive a harsh landscape, shaping the economy and ecology of the Texas Hill Country.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

By the early years of the twentieth century, the Edwards Plateau of west-central Texas had become sheep-and-goat country. Its thin limestone soils and rolling cedar brakes were poorly suited to row crops, but they could carry flocks — and the wool and mohair those flocks produced were feeding a growing national appetite. This was ranch land measured in sections, not acres, worked by families who knew the country intimately but were often at the mercy of weather they could not control.

When a severe drought settled over the region around 1914, that vulnerability turned into crisis. Grass thinned, and hungry animals turned to whatever green remained — including plants that could sicken or kill them. For ranchers whose entire livelihood walked on four legs, losses like these were not an inconvenience. They were ruin, and they arrived faster than old range wisdom could answer.

The era gave those ranchers a new tool, though: the idea that government and universities could put science to work on practical problems. Across the country in these decades, land-grant colleges and publicly funded experiment stations were being asked to solve exactly the kinds of questions — soils, crops, animal health — that had always been left to trial and error. Texas was riding that same current.

People & events

The push here came from the ground up. Local ranchers — among them B.M. Halbert, V.A. Brown, R.E. Taylor and J.B. Murrah — together with the newly formed Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association, argued that their region needed its own experiment station, staffed to study the specific troubles of plateau flocks rather than problems borrowed from elsewhere.

The state answered. The Texas Legislature appropriated ten thousand dollars to establish the facility, known as Substation No. 14, under the umbrella of Texas A&M. But public money only went so far, and the community made up the difference: citizens of Edwards and Sutton counties raised additional funds to buy a working ranch of some 3,462 acres — land from the Annie and D.B. Cusenbary Ranch — placed midway between Rocksprings and Sonora so it could serve the whole district.

The station opened in 1916, and its work never stood still. Over the decades it ranged widely — plant research and animal vaccines in the early years, then range conservation, watershed protection and the careful use of prescribed fire. Later known as the Sonora Research Station, it grew into a fixture whose findings shaped how the surrounding country was grazed, healed and kept productive.

Its place in the American story

The story of Substation No. 14 is a local chapter in a national experiment. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States built a remarkable public system for agricultural science — land-grant colleges paired with research stations meant to serve working farmers and ranchers directly. The premise was democratic: knowledge paid for by the public should flow back to the people who worked the land.

What happened on the Edwards Plateau shows why that system mattered. A problem too big for any single ranch — drought, poisonous plants, exhausted range — became solvable when a whole community pooled money and a state committed to the long, unglamorous labor of research. The answers came slowly, but they came, and they stayed available to everyone.

There is also a quiet lesson here about stewardship. Tools like range conservation, watershed protection and prescribed fire are now central to how Americans think about keeping working landscapes alive. A station that began as an emergency response to dying flocks ended up helping teach a hard-country region how to endure.

If you visit

Rocksprings sits high and open, and the drive toward Sonora carries you across the kind of plateau country this station was built to understand — limestone, cedar, wide sky, and the sense that water is always the thing in shortest supply. Take a moment to picture that landscape in a drought year, and the marker's origin story stops being abstract.

As you stand here, think about scale. More than three thousand acres were gathered so that questions could be asked patiently, over seasons and generations, rather than answered in a panic. That patience is the real monument.

This is a good stop to fold into a broader Hill Country ranching route. It rewards travelers who like their history practical — the history of how people learned to live with a demanding land rather than against it — and it pairs naturally with any exploration of the region's wool, mohair and ranching heritage.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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