Museum
Memories
Submitted by Lucille
Glasgow
Courtesy of Clay County 1890 Jail Museum - Heritage Center
The following are "Museum Memories" from the archives of the
the Clay County 1890 Jail Museum - Heritage Center, where a collection
of stories, newspaper articles and memories are located. These
articles have been published in the Clay
County Leader and are there for copyrighted by the Clay
County Leader & authors. All articles are reprinted with
permission as well as the articles posted on this site. Please do
not copy or redistribute any articles without the written permission of
the Clay
County Leader or authors.
If you would like to visit the the Clay County 1890 Jail Museum -
Heritage Center,
please contact Lucille
Glasgow for more information about the museum.
The
following is a copy of the speech given by Sam Baker Householder
at the 75th Anniversary of the Byers School Reunion, June 23,
1979, entitled "How Byers Came to Be."
"Museum Memories" published in Clay
Co. Leader, October 2002.
"I thought of giving some of the background of how Byers
came to be and how the Byers School came to be - why it was not
Boyer, Texas, or Benvanue, or Acers, any of which it could have
been. This is also the background of our sister town of Petrolia,
which came to be in the same way.
"I do not intend to glorify the Byers Brothers, whose names
appear often as involved in these events, because many, many people
contributed to making Byers, who have been remembered at previous
anniversaries and I hope will be in the future.
"Byers came to be in a way representative of Westward
Expansion, a term which people talked and wrote about and used in
political speeches and platforms for a hundred and twenty-five
years. When I was a boy I was conscious people had come here from
somewhere else. Everybody came here, from Kansas like the Ligons, or
from Grayson County, like the Hardings, or from Hunt County, like
the Shieldses, or from North Carolina, like the Dunns, or from
Georgia, like the Hendersons, or from West Virginia, like the
Grogans (It was Virginia when they were born there).
"Let’s begin with a couple of little children sleeping in a
bed upstairs over a tavern, somewhere along the road from Western
Pennsylvania to Northern Iowa. Such were the times and manners that
a gun went off in the tavern below, and the bullet went through the
ceiling and the bed above, passing between the sleeping children.
"The story isn’t completely clear: there is this family of
five who may have been travelers stopping at the tavern. Or they may
have been living there, operating the facility for a while during
their westward migration across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The two
barely-missed children were a boy, George, and a girl, Joey; there
was another, older boy, named Walter. Their father and mother were
Sam and Susan Byers. (Sam’s father, Jacob, and his grandfather had
earlier joined with most of the Boyer relationship in changing the
family name to Byers.)
"Now let’s come forward fifty years to the early 1900's. Sam
and Susan are spending their declining years in Texas, living in a
house their sons George and Walter built for them at the
headquarters of their cattle and horse ranch in the northern part of
Clay County. They died here at the ranch, ‘Grandpa’ Byers in
1902 and ‘Grandma’ Byers in 1907. They are buried back in
Nashua, Iowa, in the territory they were headed for when the
shooting incident at the tavern happened. (The little girl, Joey,
grew up to become an Iowa school teacher; she married another Iowa
teacher, S. B. Householder; they were Dorothy’s (Fransen) and my
grandparents.)
"What happened in those 50 years between 1855 and 1905 that you
and I are concerned with, that determined how Byers came to be? The
Byerses reached Iowa; Samuel W. Byers went off to fight in the Union
Army at the siege of Vicksburg. George W. and A. W. grew up and
established business connections in Kansas City, Missouri, a new and
growing city which saw its future coming from the West, and
especially from the Southwest.
"The M.K. & T. Railroad was building across Kansas and the
Indian Territory to Red River. Just before Christmas, 1872, the
first train pulled into Denison, Texas. Now Texas cattle could be
shipped north by rail instead of driven over the trails, and Texas
wheat could go the same way. Lumber and supplies could come down
into North Texas by the trainload.
"So early in 1873 George Byers reached North Texas, we suppose
on the Katy, to look over the prospects. He reported back to Kansas
City, and in 1873 he and his brother, Walter, had established the
Byers Brothers hardware business in Sherman.
"Sherman was a road and railroad connection just south of
Denison where things were pointing west toward the cattle country.
Some of the cattle country was already being ploughed up for farms,
both farmers and cattlemen needing hardware and supplies like those
the Byers Brothers were selling. They sold the first barbed wire in
North Texas from their hardware store in Sherman.
"Whether they intended to or not, before long they were in the
cattle business, too, probably taking cattle in on trade or to
liquidate debts owed the store. In the late 1870's Hence Harding and
John Harding worked cattle for the Byerses in Stephens and
Shackleford Counties around Fort Griffin. Then the Byers Brothers
sold barbed wire on the credit to Charles F. Acers to fence a 31,000
acre pasture he was buying in and near the valley of the Big Wichita
River in north Clay County. R. L. Ligon has recounted that Uncle
George told him Mr. Acers couldn’t keep up the payments on the
land and pay Byers Brothers for the wire. So he agreed to turn over
his ranch holding for the debt if the Byers Brothers would assume
all his obligations, which they did. Thus they got back the wire
plus the land it went around.
"This put them in a pretty tight spot themselves, as Mr. Ligon
told it. Mr. Byers said he would ride around his herd of a few
hundred cattle and muse to himself, ‘This steer is mine today, but
he’ll belong to the loan company tomorrow,’ because the interest
on what he owed ate up one good steer every day. (Not the last
cattle raiser to make that painful observation, I dare say.)
"Thus in 1884 the Byers Brothers were proprietors of a cattle
and horse ranch out here where we sit today. So far as I know the
first ranch building was a bunk house located out north near where
the Claude Harding residence is now. There used to be a depression
in their orchard where a well had been - I suspect it is still
there. Our mother, Mrs. Sam (Emily) Householder, wants me to remind
you in this year of anniversaries that this is the 95th anniversary
of the Byers Tree Ranch."
"So, the Byers Brothers Ranch was founded in 1884; the big
headquarters ranch house was built in 1892 - most of it still
standing, on a slightly different location. The ‘summer house’
for the Byers Brothers’ parents was built about 1900. (It was
extensively remodeled when Uncle George married in 1912.)
"Peach and apple orchards, gardens, and ornamental shrubs and
trees were extensively planted under Uncle Walter’s design and
direction, to show visitors what might be grown out here on the
prairie, should the visitors be interested in purchasing farm land
and home sites here.
"The ranch raised wheat in the big fields in the Wichita
Valley, and there are spectacular photographs of rows of a dozen
binders, in one field, pulled by 4-horse or 4-mule teams, supported
by a regiment of drivers and wheat shockers. Such an outfit could
cut, bind, and shock as much wheat then as a 12-year-old right
fielder can today, eighty years later in the very same fields, cut
and harvest completely with a Massey-Ferguson combine in an
air-conditioned cab with the FM radio going.
"But for more than 20 years the main business of the Byers
Brothers Ranch was raising cattle and horses. It had cowboys and
roundups, and it branded with the Tree brand. The ranch foreman was
John W. Harding, Bill’s grandfather, and ancestor of a lot of
people in Clay County and elsewhere. I’d like to help somebody
compile a list of the Byers Ranch cowboys - I only know of five or
six: John Harding, Hence Harding, Henry Kerr (brother of Mrs. Robbie
Harding and Mrs. Maty Kelley), Carroll Ferguson, and Charley Willum.
Two summer cowboys were Reed Byers and Ward Byers from Kansas City,
sons of Walter Byers. George Byers had no children.
"Claude Harding was the Byers Brothers’ clerk, bookkeeper and
financial agent from the ranch years on through the 1930's.
"The long-range policy of the Byers Brothers was to develop
their ranch, mostly pasture, for sale to home-seekers as farm and
ranch land. They had the ranch surveyed and subdivided into
approximately 167 tracts, or blocks, and included sites for two
town, Byers and Petrolia. (Petrolia was the name of a town in that
part of Pennsylvania which they had left 50 years earlier.)
"They arranged with Wichita Falls capitalists and with Morgan
Jones, the railroad builder, to get a 25-mile extension of the
Wichita Valley Railroad built through the Dean Ranch to Petrolia and
Byers. Called the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma, this railroad was
built in late 1903, and a sale of town lots was planned for Byers
for June 10, 1904. .Therefore, this is Byers’ birthday
"R.L. Ligon of Frederick, Oklahoma Territory, had brought a
lumber yard to the town site and built Byers’ first building, a
one-story frame office for the Byers Brothers, which still stands
next to the new Post Office. Mr. Ligon also built a shed under which
the auction would take place.
"Actually, the less said about the day Byers came to be - well,
as Mr. Ligon put it in his and Ernest Ligon’s book, ‘Just Dad:
Highlights of the Pioneer Days in the Middle West, 1867-1959,’
‘The 1904 lot sale was a flop.’
"For several months the livestock market has been depressed, so
that Byers Brothers had not been able to sell off their cattle and
horses as rapidly as planned, to make room for the anticipated land
purchasers. The only road to Byers led up from Benvanue. Long-horned
steers roamed the streets and lots staked out on the prairie. Not
many prospective buyers came out on the train to the sale.
"However, in the fall an intensive advertising campaign
developed. Those few who were here hung on. Some more roads were
built. The cattle market got better and in 1905 Byers Brothers sold
much of their livestock. Land and town lot sales picked up so that
by 1906 Byers was a real town, with several stores and other
businesses, a doctor and drug store, a grain elevator and many
houses, and a Methodist church, moved up here from Benvanue."
As a concluding element to this broad background of how Byers came
to be, and to honor the Byers School Reunion which also has brought
us all together here today, let me show how the new community of
Byers, and the Byers Brothers, valued public education. Here in
Uncle George Byers’s own handwriting is his pencil draft, probably
in 1905 or early 1906, of a plan devised by him, Mr. Ligon, and
perhaps others, a plan with a happy outcome:
‘For the purpose of raising a fund for the erection of a new
Public School Building in the town of Byers we propose to donate a
block of land 300 feet square for the location of said building and
in addition thereto we will give 20 business lots, each 25 by 140
ft. and 80 residence lots, each 50 by 140 feet, which are to be sold
at the uniform price of $50.00 each and the fund so raised to be
used as above stated. Lots will be selected out of every block in
the town plat, and are all to be subscribed for by June 25, 1906, on
which date there will be a public drawing to determine the ownership
of each lot. 100 tickets will be provided and each ticket will bear
the number of our lot and the block in which it is located. These
tickets will be put in blank envelopes after which they will be well
mixed, put in a box and drawn therefore one at a time by each party
as his name is called in the order that the names appear below.
Payment is full to be made on or before the date of drawing.’
"May I read the list of those who subscribed $50 per lot to
build this school? I think there people should be honored, and if
you listen carefully, you may hear the name of an ancestor.
"J. W. Harding, J. M. King, H. S. Nail, J. H. Irwin, J. W.
Herrin, G. L. Donham, Reed Byers, W. L. Bankston, J. P. Holcomb, J.
B. Ingram, Sam householder, L. L. Hanna, L. C. Smyers, R. J. Dice,
Thomas Warren, S. A. Grogan, Hub Stine, E. W. Grogan, P. McConville,
"E. W. Dees, L. L. Dees, J. E. Enoch, J. E. Ligon, A. F. White,
E. P. Haney, Coleman L & B Co., F. B. Wyatt, W. H. Featherston,
A. Newby, P. P. Langford, C. P. Bobo, J. M. Green, H. M. Rhyme, R.
P. Grogan, J. L. Young, M. K. Clayton, Anderson & Patterson,
"A. W. Harbin, Davis & Simmons, Cyrus Coleman, R. L. Ligon,
J. H. Fincher, H. B. Medley, Henry Davis, Lon Davis, Cobb, Bean
& Stone, Horace Russell, G. W. Harding, Merchants & Planters
Bank, Henrietta, T. H. Harrison, Eugene Zachry, Fred W. Householder,
Mrs. A. C. Zachry, G. B. Rush.
"The plan was successful; with the $5,000 raised plus some
other contributions, a two-story brick school was erected, without a
cent of bonded indebtedness, in time for the 1907 term 72 years ago.
In 1909 the first class graduated.
("Earl Clayton, nephew of M. K. Clayton, says this man surveyed
the townsites for the Byers Brothers.")
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