(NOTE: "Looking Back" offer glimpses into Plainview history. Originated to coincide with the city's centennial, articles rely heavily on information gleaned from Herald files and other sources.)


Herald Managing Editor

While the prospect of fertile farmland at cheap prices drew settlers to Plainview before the turn of the 20th century, it wasn't until the arrival of the Santa Fe Railway on Dec. 31, 1906, that the region's farmers could finally get their produces to distant markets.

A humorous first-person account of the first load of wheat shipped by rail from Plainview in 1907 illustrates the importance of transportation to the county where "King Cotton meets Queen Wheat."

Local historian Mary Lee Cox, in her 1937 book "History of Hale County, Texas," records that the area's first harvestable quantity of wheat was sown by Sterling P. Strong in 1892 on his home section one mile east of Plainview. Some 275 bushels were threshed from a field of 20 acres. However, Cox notes, "as there was no market for the grain, no appreciable amount was grown in Hale County until after the coming of the railroad."

It wasn't until early 1907 when J.V. Leatherwood, who farmed near old Emma in Crosby County, shipped the first car of wheat by rail from Plainview. And that was from a crop he had grown and harvested three years earlier.

"For lack of marketing facilities," Cox wrote, "this was held for three years awaiting the coming of the railroad, then freighted by wagon a distance of 65 miles to the terminus."

In another section of the Cox book, early elevator operator L.F. Cobb recalls Leatherwood and the first of many shipments of grain from the local depot.

Cobb owned and operated an elevator in Happy when the railroad came to Plainview, and he and business associates subsequently opened Cobb and Elliott Elevators in Tulia, Plainview, Aiken and Lockney.

In a chapter titled "Tales The Old Timers Told," Cobb recounted his initial business dealings with Leatherwood.

"The first wheat we shipped out of Plainview was hauled from down about old Emma, some 65 miles. A fellow named Leatherwood sold me a car of wheat that was three years old. He said he had been waiting three years for the railroad to haul his wheat off."

The farmer obviously was not familiar with the elevator operators' common practice, even today, of lifting the front of a wagon, trailer or truck to speed the unloading of the loose grain.

Cobb explained, "When we dumped the wagon, we took out the endgate and dumped the wheat out, lifting up the front wheels to do so. He stood and looked at it and said: 'Broken end, just as I expected.'

"He had never seen anyone dump a wagon and he thought the end was broken and spilled the wheat out," Cobb wrote. "He couldn't understand the elevator. He couldn't see why the wheat went down and went up again."

Leatherwood wasn't the only early farmer who had to get used to the newfangled ways of handling farm products, according to Cobb.

"One fellow asked what that big coal chute was and I told him it was an egg renovator that the railroad put in to keep eggs in, and he believed it." That coal chute actually was an auger used to lift grain up to dump into storage bins or railcars.

Similar methods of elevating grain for movement and storage continue to be used by the industry today.

Cobb added that during that era banks "stayed open till 9 or 10 o'clock at night. They were not uneasy about being robbed and nobody ever bothered them. We didn't have a chance to deposit any money until late at night, and lots of times we would bring up $1,000 or $1,500 to deposit."

By the mid-1930s, Cox wrote that the Texas Panhandle-Plains region was known as "The Bread Bowl of the Southwest."

"In 1909," she noted, "Hale County's total production of wheat was 16,578 bushels. In the decade that followed the acreage was gradually increased until 1919 when the output totaled 926,167 bushes." That was truly a phenomenal amount considering that "the planting was done by hand or by horse-power, the ripened grain cut with a binder, shocked, stacked and threshed with a threshing machine operated by a steam engine, which burned coal. The coal was shipped by rail from Colorado, which added to the expense and decreased the profits from the harvest."

With the arrival of the first harvester-combines in 1919, mechanization quickly boosted production. By 1929, the county was producing almost 3 million bushels of wheat annually.

Wheat continues to be an important crop to area farmers. According to the USDA, Hale County farmers planted 77,800 acres of wheat in 2007 and harvested 43,900 acres, producing 1,973,000 bushels of wheat.
