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Briscoe
County Towns (and area communities)
BRICE, TEXAS (Hall Co.)
BRICE, TEXAS Brice, on State Highway 70 in
northwestern Hall County, was named for C. R. Brice, the
county attorney from 1896 to 1900. The post office was
first located in Briscoe County in March 1899 and then
moved to the present site in February 1903 with Arthur E.
Benson as postmaster. The townsite was situated on the
Horn and Dickson properties. George Dickson gave the land
for church and school purposes, and Horn opened the first
store. At its peak in the 1920s the community served a
fertile farm area that produced cotton, grains, and
alfalfa. It had three stores and filling stations, two
churches, a blacksmith shop, a gin, a garage, and a
five-teacher brick schoolhouse for eleven grades. For
several years the community was divided into two parts,
known as North and South Brice. In 1986 a gin was located
on the South Brice site at the junction of State highways
70 and 256. The main community, which included a
combination filling station and store and two churches,
was two miles north. The school was consolidated with
that of Lakeview in 1952, and the post office was closed
in 1954, when mail was routed through Clarendon. In 1990
the population was thirty-seven. Gasoline, in southeastern
Briscoe County, is on the site of an early line camp for
cowboys. In 1903 several farm families built their homes
in the vicinity, and they later drilled a water well on
the site. Gasoline received its name from the gasoline
engine that powered the community's cotton gin, built in
1906 or 1907. At that time such a power source was a
novelty in the Panhandle. M. E. Tomson, who managed the
gin, opened the community's first store and established a
post office there in 1907. The next year W. A. Smith
began a hardware and farm-implement business. A one-room
school opened in 1908, was expanded to four rooms by
1920, and had four teachers and eleven grades by 1929. In
its early years Gasoline had a drugstore, a blacksmith
shop, a barbershop, and a cafe. Local church members met
in the schoolhouse until it was torn down in 1926, when a
new community building was built. Electricity replaced
the town's kerosene lamps and carbide lights in 1929, but
for years Gasoline had only one phone. A local literary
society staged plays, and sports such as baseball and
volleyball also supplied entertainment. The gin, the hub
of the community, burned down in 1938 and was never
rebuilt. In 1940 Gasoline reported twenty residents, and
in 1946 its school district merged with the nearby
Quitaque district. Gasoline's post office was
discontinued in 1948. During the mid-1980s there remained
several old farmhouses and the community building, in
which yearly homecomings were held. Kinder, four miles south of
Quitaque in southeastern Briscoe County, was named for
Judge L. S. Kinder, the railroad entrepreneur who led the
movement to organize the Amarillo, Plainview and Southern
Railroad in 1903. Served by a flag stop and spur on the
Fort Worth and Denver line, with which the judge worked,
Kinder receives its mail by rural delivery from Quitaque.
Quitaque is on State Highway 86
in southeastern Briscoe County. The first settler in the
area was the Comanchero trader José Piedad Tafoya, who
operated a trading post on the site from 1865 to 1867,
trading dry goods and ammunition to the Comanches for
rustled livestock. In 1877 George Baker drove a herd of
about 2,000 cattle to the Quitaque area, where he
headquartered the Lazy F Ranch. Charles Goodnight bought
the Lazy F in 1880 and introduced the name Quitaque,
which he believed was the Indian word for "end of
the trail." According to another legend the name was
derived from two buttes in the area that resembled piles
of horse manure, the real meaning of the Indian word.
Another story is that the name was taken from the Quitaca
Indians, whose name was translated by white settlers as
"whatever one steals." The Quitaque Ranch
covered parts of Briscoe, Floyd, and Hall counties. In
1882 a post office was established at ranch headquarters
on Quitaque Creek in what is now Floyd County. By 1890
the town reported forty residents. When Briscoe County
was organized in 1892 the post office was moved to the
current location of Quitaque, and the townsite was
surveyed and platted. Settlers had moved into the area by
1890. In 1891 A. R. Jago built a store there and the
first cotton crop was harvested. A school was opened
southwest of Quitaque in 1894 and moved to the townsite
in 1902. In 1907 the Twilla Hotel, a local landmark,
opened. By 1914 the town reported seventy-five residents,
a bank, and three general stores. In the 1920s Amos
Persons, president of the First National Bank of
Quitaque, succeeded in getting the Fort Worth and Denver
South Plains Railway branch line routed through the town.
In 1927 Quitaque was incorporated with P. P. Rumph as
mayor, and on November 20, 1928, the first train arrived.
By 1940 the town had affiliated schools, three churches,
thirty-four businesses, and a population of 763. In 1961
Quitaque reported 586 residents and thirty-three
businesses. In 1985 it had two city parks, a community
center, and a fire station. Numerous Russian pines had
been planted by citizens throughout the town as part of a
state beautification program, and a City Homecoming
Celebration was held every three years. In 1988 Quitaque
had an estimated population of 700 and eleven businesses.
In 1990 the population was 513. Silverton, the county seat of
Briscoe County, is on State Highway 86 in the central
part of the county. In August 1890 Thomas J. Braidfoot
filed claim on the section of land that would later
contain Silverton. He soon built a house in the area. In
the spring of the following year he and his associates,
most of whom had arrived from Della Plain in Floyd
County, formed a townsite company. The name, submitted by
his wife, was reportedly derived from the silvery
reflections of the shallow lakes in the area. A post
office, three stores, a blacksmith shop, and a school
were established by the fall of 1891. Thomas J. Briscoe
started the first newspaper, the Silverton Light. When
the county was organized, a special election was held on
March 15, 1892, in which Silverton beat out two rival
townsites, Linguish and Tarlton, as the county seat. A
two-story, frame courthouse was erected in 1893. The
following year a jail built of stone from Tule Canyon was
completed; its first occupant was the county sheriff,
Miner Crawford, who was jailed as a joke during the
opening ceremony. Tom Braidfoot's two-story house served
as the town's first hotel. A community church was used by
various denominations until they built their own houses
of worship. Tulia, the county seat of
Swisher County, is on U.S. Highway 87 forty-nine miles
south of Amarillo in the central part of the county. Its
site was originally on the acreage of the Tule Ranch
division of the JA Ranch. In 1887 a post office was
established in James A. Parrish's dugout on Middle Tule
Draw nine miles west of what is now the site of Tulia.
Evidently the name Tule, after the nearby creek, had been
selected for this post office, but at some point a
clerk's error changed the name to Tulia. Parrish served
as postmaster until 1889, when W. G. Conner took over and
the post office was moved nine miles east to the
homestead he had established in 1887. Also in 1889, a
one-room schoolhouse was built; it doubled as a church.
Eleven pupils attended school there that first year.
Conner's section was chosen for the county seat when
Swisher County was organized in 1890. He donated land for
the courthouse, the school, and the city park, which is
named after him, and ran a wagonyard in town. W. F.
Wright began publication of the first newspaper, the
Staked Plains Messenger, and by September a two-story
frame courthouse had been constructed. Scott Thacker
opened the first general store, and Mrs. S. E. Butts ran
a boardinghouse. In 1897 the Methodists constructed the
first church building. Whiteley, on the edge of the
Llano Estacado in southwestern Briscoe County, was begun
in 1901 when James Clark Whiteley arrived with his wife
and eight children by covered wagon from Bell County.
Whiteley purchased a section of land in the Lakeview
community, nine miles southwest of Silverton. The
property included a house, which the family expanded from
three rooms to nine, and several acres in cultivation.
The Whiteley children attended the Lakeview school, and
the family received mail at the Joseph H. Reeves post
office, two miles east, until it was discontinued in
1907; thereafter the homestead was included on the mail
route from Silverton. In 1927 the Whiteley community was
formed when the Fort Worth and Denver Railway established
a switch on the family's property. It quickly became a
shipping point for local farmers and ranchers, and during
the 1940s its population was listed at twenty.
Eventually, with the advent of paved roads and faster
transportation, the community waned, but the old
homestead where J. C. Whiteley and his wife spent their
remaining years was still standing in 1987. In 1985 the
community was listed as a railroad station. (information from The
Handbook of Texas Online --
This page was last updated August 16, 2000. |
