Waggoner-Hicks House
Vernon, Wilbarger County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Spottswood Lomax, a founder of the noted Matador and Espuela (Spur) ranches of Texas, built a Queen Anne house here in 1890. It was remodeled in the Colonial Revival style around the turn of the century by the prominent cattleman W. T. "Tom" Waggoner, who deeded it to his son, local banker Guy Leslie Waggoner, in 1904. Three years later, Vernon farmer and oil investor E. P. Hicks purchased the property and it remained in his family until 1967. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1988
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Spottswood Lomax, a founder of the famed Matador and Espuela (Spur) ranches, built a Queen Anne house on this spot in 1890, at the height of the great Texas cattle empires. Around the turn of the century the prominent cattleman W. T. "Tom" Waggoner remodeled it in the Colonial Revival style and deeded it to his son, banker Guy Leslie Waggoner. In 1907 it passed to farmer and oil investor E. P. Hicks, whose family held it for sixty years — a chain of owners tracing the region's shift from cattle to banking to oil.
Why it matters
The house links three pillars of North Texas fortune — the open-range cattle ranches, frontier banking, and the coming oil boom — in a single roofline.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Spottswood Lomax built his house in Vernon in 1890, North Texas was in the middle of dramatic change. Only a generation earlier, this region along the Red River had been open range and Native homeland. By the 1880s great cattle ranches had spread across the plains, and new towns were growing up to serve them.
Wilbarger County sat on one of the great cattle highways of the age. The Western Trail carried herds north across the Red River at Doan's Crossing, not far north of Vernon, on their way to Kansas railheads and northern ranges. Cattle drives, and the money they brought, helped put this part of Texas on the map.
The big ranching operations of the era were often backed by serious capital, some of it from overseas. British and Scottish investors poured money into Texas cattle companies in the 1880s, and ranches like the Matador and the Spur grew into enterprises covering vast acreage.
By the early 1900s the regional economy was branching out. Ranch fortunes flowed into banks and town building, farming expanded, and oil soon became part of the story. Just to the east, in neighboring Wichita County, the famous Electra oil field came in around 1911 on land connected to the Waggoner family. The ownership history of this single house tracks that whole shift.
People & events
The house began with Spottswood Lomax, whom the marker names as a founder of two of the most famous ranches in Texas, the Matador and the Espuela, or Spur. He built a Queen Anne home here in 1890. That style, full of towers, porches, varied rooflines, and decorative trim, was the fashionable choice for prosperous Americans in those years, and a strong sign that frontier Vernon was becoming a settled town.
Around the turn of the century the house passed into the hands of W. T. "Tom" Waggoner, one of the best-known cattlemen in Texas. The Waggoner family built one of the largest ranching empires in the state. Waggoner remodeled the house in the Colonial Revival style, a popular look at the time that drew on early American architecture with columns, symmetry, and classical details. The change shows how architectural fashion was moving from Victorian exuberance toward more restrained styles.
In 1904 Tom Waggoner deeded the house to his son, Guy Leslie Waggoner, a Vernon banker. It is a telling detail: the son of a great cattleman working in finance, part of the way ranch wealth was turning into banks and businesses that anchored growing towns.
Just three years later, in 1907, the house was bought by E. P. Hicks, a Vernon farmer and oil investor. His family kept it until 1967, sixty years in all. With Hicks, the house's story turns toward the agricultural and oil economy that would shape North Texas through the twentieth century.
Its place in the American story
Few buildings sum up the economic history of a region as neatly as this one. In less than two decades it passed from a founder of legendary cattle ranches, to a ranching dynasty, to a banker, to a farmer and oil investor. That is the arc of much of the American West: cattle first, then finance and farming, then oil.
The ranches linked to Lomax are part of a national and even international story. The big Texas cattle outfits of the 1880s fed markets across the country and drew capital from abroad, especially from Britain and Scotland. The cattle boom tied remote Texas counties to Chicago stockyards, Eastern tables, and investors in faraway cities.
The house's changing styles also reflect national tastes. Queen Anne and Colonial Revival were popular across the United States, spread by pattern books, magazines, and the railroads that carried both building materials and ideas. A prosperous family in Vernon wanted what prosperous families in Ohio or New England wanted.
Finally, the Waggoner and Hicks connections point toward the oil age that transformed Texas and the nation in the twentieth century. The house stands at the hinge between the open-range era and the energy economy that followed.
If you visit
The Waggoner-Hicks House is in Vernon, the seat of Wilbarger County, near the Red River in North Texas. It is recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, and the house itself is the main thing to see. Unless it is clearly open to the public, treat it as private property and enjoy it from the street.
Look for evidence of its double life. The house was built in the Queen Anne style and later remodeled as Colonial Revival, so study the rooflines, porches, and trim and see whether you can spot which features feel classical and orderly and which hint at the older Victorian design.
Vernon makes a good base for exploring ranch-country history. The Western Trail crossing at Doan's Crossing on the Red River lies to the north, and the surrounding plains still show the scale of the great ranch era. The oil country around Electra, to the east, adds the next chapter of the story.
A drive through this part of North Texas takes you across cattle country, small courthouse towns, and oil-field landscapes. It is a road trip through the forces that built modern Texas, and this house brings several of them together at one address.
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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Related people
- · Spottswood Lomax
- · W. T. Waggoner
- · Guy Leslie Waggoner
- · E. P. Hicks
Themes & tags
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