Winters State Bank
Winters, Runnels County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded 1906 by John Q. McAdams, who served 17 years as cashier, and since as president. Original capitalization was $15,000. First located immediately south; moved to this site 1909. Bought Farmers and Merchants State Bank, 1913; First National Bank of Winters, 1937. Building was enlarged 1924 and 1954. Founder was treasurer (1918) and president (1931-1932), Texas State Bankers Association; State Banking Commissioner (1941-1944); held office as president of the State Banks Division, American Bankers Association (1950-51). Recorded Texas Historical Landmark, 1967
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1906 by John Q. McAdams with just $15,000 in capital, Winters State Bank grew into a fixture of West Texas finance, absorbing rival banks and expanding its building over the decades. McAdams himself rose to statewide and national prominence, serving as Texas State Banking Commissioner and holding office in the American Bankers Association. The bank's story is really the story of one man's long stewardship of a small-town institution.
Why it matters
The bank shows how local financial institutions — and the community bankers who ran them — underwrote the growth of small Texas towns in the twentieth century.
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Related people
- · John Q. McAdams
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Winters
Winters, TX
Winters began in the 1880s when the Curry and Bell families staked claims on the west-central Texas prairie, and it took its name in 1889 by a vote in a new schoolhouse built on land from agent J.N. Winters. Cattle, feed, and cotton gave it an early economy, and the arrival of a rail line from Abilene in 1909 — with blacktop roads and the automobile close behind — brought a wave of prosperity. Oil strikes in 1949 and local milling and manufacturing kept the town growing, though it never followed a planned grid.
Winters FFA Chapter
Winters, TX
In the fall of 1928 thirty students in the vocational agriculture class at Winters High School organized a Future Farmers club, the same year the national FFA was founded in Kansas City. On April 10, 1930, the club received the first Texas charter of the national organization. Over the decades the Winters chapter produced award-winning students and generations of farmers and businessmen across Runnels County.
Old Cotton Oil Mill
Winters, TX
Winters got its first industrial plant when Bird, Hall and Mertz of San Angelo built this cottonseed oil mill in 1909-10, its millhouse walls quarried from stone at the Posey farm on Gap Creek. The mill crushed cottonseed into cake, meal, hulls, and oil, and gave the town a payroll, a work whistle that marked the day, and a distinctive aroma. It passed through the hands of Ballinger and Houston owners before closing in 1939 as cotton farming declined.
Chick Inn Diner
Winters, TX
Mass-produced automobiles put hungry motorists on the road, and roadside food stands soon evolved into drive-ins with curb service — a boom that surged after World War II. In 1950, W.H. Kemper and R.A. Doberrer built a small frame stand on the edge of Winters as the El Rancho Drive-in, quickly resold and renamed the Chick Inn. For three decades it was the town's teenage heartbeat, where young people "made the drag" over burgers and shakes, until a 1982 tornado leveled the building.