Hutchinson County Towns
Source: The Handbook of Texas Online
JEFFRY,
TEXAS
ISOM,
TEXAS
GEWHITT,
TEXAS
PLEMONS,
TEXAS
DIAL,
TEXAS
TEXROY,
TEXAS
SIGNAL
HILL, TEXAS
ELECTRIC
CITY, TEXAS
BELLE
PLAIN, TEXAS
ADOBE
WALLS, TEXAS
JEFFRY,
TEXAS
Jeffry, in northeastern Hutchinson County, had a post
office from March 1902 to October 1918, after which mail
was sent to Adobe Walls. Area children attended the Holt
School, built in 1906 on land donated by Ben Holt. This
school reported fifty-seven students around 1916-18 but
only seven in 1928. In 1949 the school was consolidated
with the Pringle and Spearman schools, and its building
was subsequently used as a community center. A 1982 map
showed a cemetery nearby.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arthur Hecht, comp., Postal History in the
Texas Panhandle (Canyon, Texas: Panhandle-Plains
Historical Society, 1960). Hutchinson County Historical
Commission, History of Hutchinson County, Texas (Dallas:
Taylor, 1980).
H. Allen Anderson
ISOM, TEXAS
Isom, once an independent town, is now the oldest of
several communities that collectively make up the city of
Borger, in south central Hutchinson County. It was
founded in 1898 by rancher John F. Weatherly, who built a
dugout on the site for his family, and originally dubbed
Granada. It was renamed by Weatherly's wife, Maggie, for
a now-defunct town in her home state of West Virginia. As
Weatherly acquired more land, other settlers moved in.
In 1900 a post office was established, and Weatherly
opened the town's first store in the basement of his
stone ranchhouse. A school was begun in 1907, and Maggie
Weatherly opened a cafe. The post office remained in
operation until October 1919, when the mail was directed
to Plemons. Although the Weatherlys moved to the town of
Panhandle in 1922, they retained ownership of the
townsite of Isom. In May 1926, after an oil boom resulted
in the founding of Borger, Weatherly moved the town to
the Santa Fe Railroad's oilfield branch line and platted
it adjacent to Borger. First Street marked the dividing
line; all lots south of the street were in Isom.
For seven months, both towns vied for the coveted role of
capital of the county's oilfields. The railroad depot and
several oil-well supply houses were located in Isom, and
newspaper ads attracted many who hoped to profit from the
boom. On December 1, however, 1,200 residents
successfully petitioned that Isom be merged with Borger.
By 1927 the consolidation of the Isom school with that of
Borger had made the merger complete.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hutchinson County Historical Commission,
History of Hutchinson County, Texas (Dallas: Taylor,
1980). F. Stanley, The Isom, Texas, Story (Nazareth,
Texas, 1973).
H. Allen Anderson
GEWHITT,
TEXAS
Gewhitt, five miles south of Stinnett in southwestern
Hutchinson County, was named for George Whittenburg, son
of James A. Whittenburg, who managed the family's ranch
properties. A Gewhitt grade school was in operation for
several years. On May 26, 1927, after the opening of the
Panhandle oilfield, a post office was established in the
town's general store. It remained in operation until
1942, after which mail was sent to Stinnett. Throughout
the 1940s Gewhitt had a population of sixty but declined
afterward.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arthur Hecht, comp., Postal History in the
Texas Panhandle (Canyon, Texas: Panhandle-Plains
Historical Society, 1960). Hutchinson County Historical
Commission, History of Hutchinson County, Texas (Dallas:
Taylor, 1980). Fred Tarpley, 1001 Texas Place Names
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
H. Allen Anderson
PLEMONS,
TEXAS
Plemons had its beginning in 1898 when James A.
Whittenburg, an area rancher, built his dugout in a hill
overlooking a bend in the Canadian River in central
Hutchinson County. The site was named for Barney Plemons,
the son of Amarillo judge and state legislator William
Buford Plemons, who had filed on land there. When the
county was organized in the spring of 1901, Plemons was
chosen county seat.
A school and a post office were established, and a road
was laid out from Plemons toward Dumas in Moore County. A
two-story frame courthouse was built later that year,
replacing a smaller temporary structure. Plemons
experienced slow growth as a river-crossing town for area
ranches, including the Turkey Track and Tar Box outfits.
Between 1902 and 1905, a wagonyard, a barbershop, a
doctor's office, a drugstore, and a mercantile store were
established, and at least fifteen families made Plemons
their home.
William (Billy) Dixon, former buffalo hunter, scout, and
the county's first sheriff, moved his growing family to
Plemons and for three years operated a boarding house.
Despite the fact that his three oldest children went to
school in Plemons, Dixon claimed that he "found
living in town worse than it could have been in
jail." Although a permanent church building was
never constructed, a parsonage was built, and services
were held either in the school or the courthouse. The
community also became noted for its string band and
five-day teacher institutes.
Plemons declined when the Amarillo branch line of the
Rock Island line bypassed it. A special election in the
fall of 1926 made the new town of Stinnett, ten miles to
the northwest and on the railroad, county seat.
Nevertheless, Plemons managed to survive for two more
decades with hopes of profiting from the county's oil
boom. Considerable excitement occurred on March 18, 1932,
when W. J. (Shine) Popejoy, the king of the Texas
bootleggers, held up the town bank.
In 1940 Plemons reported three businesses and a
population of 100. By the 1950s, however, the town fell
into oblivion as more residents moved to neighboring
communities. The post office was closed in June 1952.
Though the Plemons Independent School District has been
in continuous existence since 1925, the town had no
official population listings. Only the cemetery stands as
a reminder of its heyday.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Olive K. Dixon, Life of "Billy"
Dixon (1914; rev. ed., Dallas: Turner, 1927; facsimile,
Austin: State House, 1987). Hutchinson County Historical
Commission, History of Hutchinson County, Texas (Dallas:
Taylor, 1980). John L. McCarty, Adobe Walls Bride (San
Antonio: Naylor, 1955). Jerry Sinise, Black Gold and Red
Lights (Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1982). F. Stanley,
The Plemons Story (Nazareth, Texas, 1973).
H. Allen Anderson
DIAL,
TEXAS
Dial, also known as Gulf Dial, is on Farm Road 2277
southeast of Stinnett in central Hutchinson County. It
was named for the Dial Ranch, on which it was established
in 1925, when the Gulf Oil Company drilled its Dial No. 1
well, the first in the county north of the Canadian
River. By 1926 a sizable oil town, complete with a post
office, rose on the site. The improvement of highways and
transportation facilities, however, which ended the oil
subsidiary-camp system, led to the town's demise. By 1976
the post office had been discontinued. In the 1980s
several wells at the site were still in production. Dial
had a population estimated at eighty from 1968 to 1990.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: N. D. Bartlett, "Discovery of the
Panhandle Oil and Gas Field," Panhandle-Plains
Historical Review 12 (1939).
H. Allen Anderson
TEXROY,
TEXAS
Texroy, a small oilfield community five miles southeast
of Borger in southern Hutchinson County, was established
in the late 1920s during the height of the local oil boom
and was named for S. D. (Tex) McIlroy, founder of the
Dixon Creek Oil and Refinery Company. The Texroy
community reportedly had a population of fifty in 1948
and was on a mail route from White Deer. It was
eventually absorbed by Borger.
H. Allen Anderson
SIGNAL
HILL, TEXAS
Signal Hill was a small oil boom camp a mile and a half
east of Stinnett in Hutchinson County. It was founded in
1926 by Earl Thompson on a tentative survey of the
Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway and had a brief but
uninhibited life as a quasi-independent community during
the boom of the late 1920s. Throughout this time it was
generally regarded as a hangout for bootleggers,
prostitutes, gamblers, and other undesirables who drifted
into the oil fields.
Among the noted criminals who frequented Signal Hill were
Ray Terrell, Ace Pendleton, Matt Kimes, and the
bootlegging brothers Torrance and W. J. (Shine) Popejoy.
At its peak in 1926-27, the camp was infested with beer
emporiums, brothels, gambling dens, speakeasies, and
other places of ill repute. Thompson opened a bank in
Signal Hill. In addition, the settlement contained four
drugstores, a bakery, an ice house, a dozen filling
stations, a welding shop, a boiler shop, a hardware
store, three oil-supply houses, a meat market, a movie
house, and several hotels and rooming houses.
One citizen recalled that the post office was the only
place in the camp that did not sell alcoholic beverages.
After the first cleanup of the Borger area by Texas
Rangers in 1927, Signal Hill's population rapidly
decreased, as its centers of vice were shut down. The
proposed railroad spur was never built, and the community
was abandoned in about a year.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jerry Sinise, Black Gold and Red Lights
(Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1982). F. Stanley, The
Signal Hill Story (Nazareth, Texas, 1973).
H. Allen Anderson
ELECTRIC
CITY, TEXAS
Electric City was established on the south bank of the
Canadian River in south central Hutchinson County. It
began in July 1926 with the construction of the Panhandle
Power and Light Company's Riverview Power Plant, three
miles north of Borger. Men worked day and night until the
plant was completed, so that electricity could be made
available to neighboring oilfields as soon as possible.
The plant's turbines began turning in November.
Soon a subsidiary camp grew around the facility as the
county's oil boom gained momentum. Within weeks, plant
employees and oilfield workers had formed a sizable
settlement, complete with dirt streets. With the
improvement of local highways and transportation,
however, employees no longer found it necessary to live
next to the plant. By 1948 Electric City's population
numbered only five. The plant was owned by Southwestern
Public Service by the mid-1980s. At that time there was
no longer a population at the site, since the plant was
an easy commute from Borger.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bobby D. Weaver, ed., Panhandle Petroleum
(Amarillo: Miller National Corporation, 1982).
H. Allen Anderson
BELLE
PLAIN, TEXAS
(Moore County).
Belle Plain was east of Dumas in eastern Moore County.
The site was settled in 1927, when certain of the lawless
element, who had been driven out of Borger by the Texas
Rangers, fled Hutchinson County and set up shop just
across the county line. The development consisted mostly
of crude, hastily built shacks and quickly became a
booming, bawdy settlement that specialized in bootleg
beer and whiskey, gambling dens, and brothels.
Almost as quickly as it had grown, the town shrank, as
its temporary residents moved away to escape the law
again. By 1929 only the school, a store, and a filling
station remained. The post office was closed and mail
routed to Stinnett in 1930. Many buildings were either
torn down or allowed to fall apart, while others were
moved to Altman (now Sunray). By the time prohibition was
repealed in 1933, Belle Plain had ceased to exist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Myrna Tryon Thomas, The Windswept Land: A
History of Moore City (Dumas, Texas, 1967).
H. Allen Anderson
WILCO,
TEXAS
Wilco (originally Wilcoe), on Farm Road 2587 in extreme
northeastern Hartley County, was founded in 1909 by the
brothers James Edward and Frank B. Wilson, ranchers and
land developers who came with their families from
Effingham, Kansas. The Wilsons' brother John and his
wife, Katie, also helped promote the proposed townsite.
The Wilsons established a mercantile store and a
combination school and church near their new ranch
headquarters, laid out a park with planted trees, and
soon sold several town lots.
Wilco was one of the townsites included in the proposed
Enid, Ochiltree, and Western Railroad line, and the
tracks were laid from Dalhart to Wilco before the
railroad plans fell through. Service on this line
continued until 1911, however, and later on it was
connected with a spur of the Rock Island line to Pringle
in Hutchinson County. By 1940 only the school remained.
Ed Wilson and his wife lived at Wilco until they moved to
Dalhart in the late 1940s. Their heirs continued to
occupy the ranchhouse. A grain elevator stands near the
railroad spur, and the mail is routed through Dalhart.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lillie Mae Hunter, The Book of Years: A
History of Dallam and Hartley Counties (Hereford, Texas:
Pioneer, 1969).
Jennie Rose Powell
ADOBE
WALLS, TEXAS
Adobe Walls was the name given several trading posts and
later a ranching community located seventeen miles
northeast of Stinnett and just north of the Canadian
River in what is now northeastern Hutchinson County. The
first trading post in the area seems to have been
established in early 1843 by representatives of the
trading firm of Bent, St. Vrain and Company, which hoped
to trade with the Comanches and Kiowas.
These Indians avoided Bent's Fort, the company's main
headquarters on the upper Arkansas River near La Junta,
Colorado, because enemies, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes,
lived in the area. The new satellite post was situated on
a stream that became known as Bent's (now Bent) Creek.
Company traders worked originally from tepees and later
from log structures. Probably no real fort was built on
the site before 1846. Sometime after September 1845
William Bent and Ceran St. Vrain, chief partners in the
firm, arrived with Mexican adobe makers to replace the
log establishment with Fort Adobe, a structure eighty
feet square, with nine-foot walls and only one entrance.
Occupation of Fort Adobe was sporadic, and by 1848 Indian
hostility had resulted in its closure. That fall a
momentary peace was effected, and Bent sought to reopen
the post by sending Christopher (Kit) Carson, Lucien
Maxwell, and five other employees to the Canadian.
Resistance from the Jicarilla Apaches, however, forced
Carson's group to cache the trade goods and buffalo robes
they had acquired and return to Bent's Fort.
Soon after, several Comanches persuaded Bent to make
another try at resuming trade at Fort Adobe. A
thirteen-man party, led by R. W. (Dick) Wootton,
encountered restive Comanches at the fort and finally
conducted trade through a window cut in the wall. In the
spring of 1849, in a last concerted effort to revive the
post, Bent accompanied several ox-drawn wagons to the
Canadian. After part of his stock was killed by Indians,
he blew up the fort's interior with gunpowder and
abandoned the Panhandle trade to the Comancheros.
The adobe ruins thus became a familiar landmark to both
Indians and Comancheros and to any white man who dared to
venture into the heart of Comancherķa. In November 1864
Carson, now a colonel of volunteers, used the walls of
Fort Adobe to rest his 300 men and their horses after
sacking a Kiowa village during a campaign against the
tribes of the southern Plains. The group withstood
several Indian attacks at the fort before withdrawing
(see ADOBE
WALLS, FIRST BATTLE OF).
In March 1874 merchants from Dodge City, Kansas,
following the buffalo hunters south into the Texas
Panhandle, established a large complex, called the Myers
and Leonard Store, about a mile north of the Fort Adobe
ruins. This business, which included a corral and
restaurant, was joined in April 1874 by a second store
operated by Charles Rath and Company. Shortly afterward
James N. Hanrahan and Rath opened a saloon, and Tom
O'Keefe started a blacksmith shop. By the end of spring,
200 to 300 buffalo hunters roamed the area, and trade at
Adobe Walls boomed. After an Indian uprising called the
second battle of Adobe Walls (June 1874) both merchants
and hunters abandoned the site.
In the early 1880s James M. Coburn established his Turkey
Track Ranch headquarters near the old battle site and
persuaded William (Billy) Dixon, a scout and survivor of
the 1874 battle, to homestead several sections nearby.
Dixon built his house at the ruins of Fort Adobe. In
August 1887 a post office was established at the Dixon
homestead, where Dixon and S. G. Carter also operated a
ranch-supply store. Dixon served as postmaster until
1901, when he was elected the county's first sheriff. He
resigned shortly afterward and about 1902 moved to
Plemons.
A school was also established; after the first building
burned in 1920, school was conducted on the second floor
of Dixon's old home until a new structure could be built.
Although the Dodge City Times advertised Adobe Walls as
"a fine settlement with some twenty families,"
there never was a real community in the area except for
the ranchers and their employees and families. The post
office remained in operation until October 1921. From
1940 until 1970 Adobe Walls was listed in the Texas
Almanac as having a population of fifteen. In 1987 a few
scattered ranch dwellings marked the area.
During the 1920s several local and state projects were
launched to mark the battle site at Adobe Walls and make
it more accessible. In 1923 the Panhandle-Plains
Historical Society acquired a six-acre tract that
contained the remains of the 1874 trading post. The
society conducted major archeological excavations at this
site in the 1970s. In 1978 the complex was added to the
National Register of Historic Places and recognized as a
Texas state archeological landmark.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: T. Lindsay Baker and Billy R. Harrison,
Adobe Walls: The History and Archaeology of the 1874
Trading Post (College Station: Texas A&M University
Press, 1986). T. Lindsay Baker, Ghost Towns of Texas
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986). George Bird
Grinnell, "Bent's Old Fort and Its Builders,"
Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society,
1919-1922 15 (1923). Arthur Hecht, comp., Postal History
in the Texas Panhandle (Canyon, Texas: Panhandle-Plains
Historical Society, 1960). Hutchinson County Historical
Commission, History of Hutchinson County, Texas (Dallas:
Taylor, 1980). David Lavender, Bent's Fort (Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, 1954). Mildred P. Mayhall, The
Kiowas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962; 2d
ed. 1971). John L. McCarty, Adobe Walls Bride (San
Antonio: Naylor, 1955). Frederick W. Rathjen, The Texas
Panhandle Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1973).
H. Allen Anderson