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| Deaf Smith County Texas |
The headline of the local newspaper for July 19, 1901, captured some of the excitement. Community leaders in Hereford, a northwest Texas town named after a sturdy breed of beef cattle, were nothing if not ambitious. Now they had a new ally.
As the paper explained, Randolph Clark had recently visited Hereford at the invitation of G. R. "Rat" Jowell, a prominent local rancher, the Deaf Smith Count surveyor, and a founding member of the local Christian Church. Clark, a graduate of Bethany College and a long-time educator and preacher among the Christian churches, had changed his mind about Hereford. Before his visit, "the idea of a college at this point or in this section of the country" never entered his mind. He considered the region nothing more than "a waste desert and wholly unfit for anything save cattle raising." But now, said the paper, Clark recognized
the health-giving properties of this dry atmosphere, the excellence of our water and the ease and little cost of obtaining it, the vigorous growth of trees, shrubbery, flowers and all kinds of garden produce and grain, the thriftyness [sic] and high moral standard of our citizens, the excellent drainage of Hereford and the easy access to it from all parts of the country.[1]The "easy access" to Hereford had come just two years earlier, in 1899, when the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway completed track running southwest through the town all the way to Farwell at the New Mexico border. As a result, Hereford enjoyed a railroad connection to Amarillo and, from there, to other parts of the U.S.[2]
It was an exciting place at an exciting time. When Clark made his first visit to Hereford, the town was only three years old. But it was already home to more than one general store, a grocery store, a meat market, drug store, restaurant, confectionery, hotel, saloon, furniture store, and feed yard. Hereford had a barber, a blacksmith, and a postmaster.[3] Something else would soon be added. In the summer of 1901, a front-page story announced, "We Will Have a College."[4]
Notes
[1] Editorial, Hereford Reporter, July 19, 1901. The URL for this issue is as follows: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142256/m1/1/, accessed April 15, 2019. For G. R. Jowell as an active, successful rancher in Deaf Smith County, see, for example, notices in the Hereford Reporter, August 6, 1901, p. 5.https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142259/m1/5/?q=Rat%20Jowell For Jowell as the county surveyor, see "A New Firm," Hereford Reporter, August 6, 1901, p. 6 https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142259/m1/6/. For Jowell as a founding member of the Christian Church at Hereford, see The Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Christian Church, Hereford, Texas (Hereford, TX: First Christian Church, 1949), 5. G. R. Jowell's middle name was Ratliff, which appears to be a variation of an old family name, Radcliff. Apparently, somebody once called George Ratliff Jowell by the name "Rat," and it stayed with him. For the nineteenth-century image of the Great Plains as the "Great American Desert," see G. Malcolm Lewis, "William Gilpin and the Concept of the Great Plains Region," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56, no. 1 (March 1966): 35-36.
[2] Handbook of Texas Online, H. Allen Anderson, "HEREFORD, TX," accessed December 28, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/heh02; H. Allen Anderson, "PECOS AND NORTHERN TEXAS RAILWAY," accessed December 28, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/eqp09. For Amarillo's railroad connections to other parts of the U.S., see Paul H. Carlson, Empire Builder in the Texas Panhandle: William Henry Bush (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 85-86.
[3] Bessie Chambers Patterson, "Hereford: From Cow Town to Capitol [sic] of Farming Empire,1898-1952," 4. This manuscript is housed in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, TX.
[4] Hereford Reporter, July 19, 1901.
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