Town of Knapp
Snyder, Scurry County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Pioneers settling Bull Creek, 1888, where herds of bull buffalo grazed, called their community Bison. They founded the Baptist Church on the creek bank, the school in a nearby pasture. Bison was located on fringe of the ranch belonging to A. P. Bush and Benjamin Tillar, both prominent early Texas cattlemen. In 1890, name of town and post office (then housed in a dugout) became "Knapp" after the U.S. Post Office Department refused Bison because it was a duplicate name. In 1959, after a rousing decade of serving the oil boom workers, the post office closed. (1967)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1888 by pioneers settling Bull Creek, this little community first called itself Bison for the great bull buffalo that once grazed the surrounding plains. When the Post Office rejected the duplicate name, the town became Knapp, its post office housed in a frontier dugout on land near the ranches of prominent Texas cattlemen A. P. Bush and Benjamin Tillar. After a last flush of life serving oil-boom workers, the post office closed in 1959 and the town faded.
Why it matters
Knapp's arc from buffalo range to cattle country to oil-patch waystation, and finally to a ghost of itself, tells the whole compressed history of the West Texas frontier in a single place-name.
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Related people
- · A. P. Bush
- · Benjamin Tillar
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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The Block 97 dispute grew out of Texas's practice of paying railroads in public land for the track they laid. In 1873 the Houston & Texas Central mistakenly claimed some 300,000 acres reserved for the Texas & Pacific; when the error surfaced in 1882 it voided countless deeds, and much of the land was unscrupulously resold, sparking a decade of tangled claims until the legislature declared it state school land in 1899.
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