Witkowski Pest Control

LOL 😂😂😂

Please call 806 570 2446 if you need to reach us. Thank you. Gerald

A family on the border in South Texas circa 1915. I see these old photos of people in hard circumstances --- the border, the Panhandle, East Texas ... it doesn't matter where ---- and I wonder if I would have been able to hack such a life. It may simply be a matter of what you're accustomed to and how you've grown up, but it sure seems like I'd have a hard time smiling in such harsh conditions. And yet these folks appear to be happy.

Photo from the Library of Congress.

The Deaf Smith County Courthouse, 1892. At this time the courthouse was in La Plata, which is now a ghost town. Per the TSHA:

"La Plata, originally named Grenada, was founded in 1890 by the XIT Ranch interests when Deaf Smith County was organized. The town engaged in a heated contest with neighboring Ayr to be the county seat, an honor that Grenada won in a controversial election on October 3, 1890. Soon afterwards the newly elected county judge, J. R. Dean, changed the name of Grenada to La Plata on request of federal postal officials. A small frame courthouse was built of lumber hauled from Amarillo. As the town grew, it added a post office, a school, a county jail, a Presbyterian church, and eighteen residents. Businesses included a general store, a pharmacy, a saloon, a hotel, an implement house, a blacksmith shop, a livery stable, and a printing office which housed the county's first newspaper, the La Plata Star.

The weather hindered the town's development almost from the beginning. From 1891 to 1894 the area around La Plata suffered a drought, which made farming and ranching almost impossible. Also disaster struck in February 1897, when a blizzard resulted in below-freezing temperatures for twenty-one consecutive days. More than half of the town's populace was compelled to leave. Moreover, in 1899 the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway built through the southern part of Deaf Smith County and into New Mexico. On November 8 of that year the citizens of La Plata chose a new county seat, the new town of Blue Water (or Bluewater, now Hereford), on the railroad. Nine houses, the courthouse, and the jail were loaded onto wagons and moved to the new location. Today nothing remains of the abandoned townsite except a few graves in the cemetery on land that has been reclaimed for farming. One memento of La Plata's brief life is the original portable jail, now on display at the Deaf Smith County Museum in Hereford."

H. Allen Anderson, "LA PLATA, TX," Handbook of Texas Online

Photo courtesy the Deaf Smith County Library in Hereford

A group of working cowboys on the XIT ranch in the Texas Panhandle, 1904. This photo was taken by noted photographer W.O. Harper and it is a DANDY.

Congratulations to the Texas Aggies for beating #1 ranked Alabama in football last night. Alabama looked like an unstoppable machine and the Aggies got it done. The 1913 Texas Aggie band salutes you!

Texas A&M College shortly after its establishment as a college. The building in the foreground is Stewards Hall and the Old Main building is visible in the distance.

Ha!