Historic Texas Ranch Homes: Preservation and Restoration
“The National Ranching Heritage Center is an excellent venue, a three-dimensional education, for anyone interested in learning more about Texas ranching, the historic built environment, and life of early ranchers, cowboys, and their families. Their mettle, against overwhelming odds was what we hope we would have shown, had we been there to settle Texas.”
Steve Chambers, AIA
In Owen Wister’s best-known book, The Virginian, Horseman of the Plains, the lead-up to the story establishes the hero as “a courageous loner who follows his private code of honor while prevailing over the forces of evil.” Wister dedicated this Western masterpiece to his friend Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s friend, Frederic Remington, illustrated later editions of the novel. This one novel set the tradition of the West permanently. What began as fiction, rewrote history and imprinted us with the cowboy as a solitary romantic figure. We continue to be charmed by Western stories, Western movies and dramas, but don’t actually understand the hardships and loneliness of the real cowboys and their ranching families.
Home on the Range, an early “cowboy song,” was originally documented and transcribed by noted musicologist, Alan A. Lomax. In the version of this song discovered by Lomax, the cowhand sings of his youth in Texas where he enjoys working on a family ranch and listening to cowboys sing as they travel the old Chisholm Trail. Lomax’s vividly rich collection of cowboy and folk songs helped to further shape the Western frontier as an extraordinarily authentic and unspoiled place in which the adventurer can develop a deep interconnection with nature and find his unique place in the world.
“Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
How often at night where the heavens are bright
With the light of the glittering stars
Have I stood there amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours.”
The National Ranching Heritage Center, located in West Texas at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, displays the western built environment in a natural setting that communicates the veracity of the early ranchers’ lives. It portrays Texas’ ranching history through the successful relocation, preservation, and rehabilitation of many fine homes, barns, bunkhouses, a railway station, and other examples of the rural built environment of 18th, 19th, and 20th century Texas. The Center opened in 1976 during the Bicentennial celebration in the United States and the Visitor’s Entrance and Building was designed to reflect the character of Texas and Southwest architecture. It is a living museum where the texture and detail of the frugal old ranch homes of yesteryear can actually be experienced. It underscores the early Texas ranchers’ inspiring ability to persevere through the punishing Texas sun, floods, hail, brutal windstorms, mercurial conditions for raising crops and livestock. Visitors are at once reminded by each rustic ranching building that this tough mettle is a major element in the Texas DNA. A book that helps to support the center and beautifully illustrates each relocated structure and its provenance, is called Across Time and Territory, A Walk Through The National Ranching Heritage Center by Marsha Pfluger. It can be obtained through the Center’s website.
1888 Dickens County Matador Ranch Half-Dugout, shelter from weather provided by locating half of home below ground in scooped out earth.
1901 Dugout kitchen for ranch originally located in Whiteface, TX. Below ground stove provided heat for bedroom, located on upper ground level.
Questad Farm is a rare example of 19th century Norwegian Rock House Construction, and the only remaining ranch of its type with multiple structures in Texas. By 1900, their settlement had grown into the largest Norwegian colony west of the Mississippi River.
A signed, first edition, copy is $30 plus tax and shipping.
