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From: http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/012106/loc_012106041.shtml

1876 - Texas Legislature establishes Lubbock County and names it for Thomas S. Lubbock, a former Texas Ranger.

1890 - Rival settlements built up on opposite sides of Yellow House Canyon.

1891 - Present site of downtown Lubbock purchased for $1,920, and previous communities moved to the new site, creating a population of more than 100.

1900 - Lubbock County population reaches 293 in the 1900 census.

1909 - Railroad comes to Lubbock.

1910 - Lubbock's urban population reaches 1,938 in 1910 census.

1920 - Lubbock's population reaches 4,051 in the 1920 census.

Timeline v.1.2

Highlights in Lubbock's History:

Depictions of Wild West were part of Lubbock's history

BY RAY WESTBROOK
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

Much of the Wild West imagery that even Hollywood might have imagined has taken place in Lubbock's history.

From skirmishes between buffalo hunters and Comanches, to pioneer ranchers pasturing their herds in a seemingly endless sea of grass, Lubbock has experienced it all. And the city that emerged from that heritage of resourcefulness, symbolically began with a lonely first store set up by George Washington Singer in 1882.

Singer's outpost store, located near the present Lubbock Lake Landmark in Yellow House Canyon, also was positioned in an area where four military routes crossed, according to research done by H. Allen Anderson for an article in "The handbook of Texas."

During its short lifetime in Yellow House Canyon, Singer's store thrived, was burned to the ground by a Mexican outlaw, rebuilt from lumber hauled from Colorado City, and finally moved to the foundational site of the town of Lubbock.

Lubbock actually can trace its origin to a spirit of unity. There were two competing communities at first, one located north of the present Texas Tech campus, and the other along the western edge of what is now Lubbock International Airport.

Lubbock timeline.

Historian Paul H. Carlson, professsor at Texas Tech, reports there were two groups of promoters who had established embryonic towns called Lubbock and Monterey.

"Because the villages were less than three miles apart - although divided by a shallow canyon of the Brazos - a compromise was needed, for everyone understood that both communities could not survive," he said.

"In December 1890, having reached an accommodation, the promoters, led by W.E. Rayner, Frank Wheelock and Rollie Burns, agreed to a third site, and a new town, also called Lubbock, appeared south of the canyon where they thought a railroad might pass through the area."

The competing towns - including Singer's store and the two-story Nicolett Hotel - were moved to what is now the downtown area of Broadway and Buddy Holly Avenue.

According to David Murrah, an author with Carlson and Donald Abbe of the book "Lubbock and the South Plains," the Nicolett was moved almost whole. Its front porch was taken off, the rest of the building placed on skids, and then it was pulled slowly and painstakingly to the new site by teams of horses.

But life in Lubbock itself was off and running. The town won election as the political seat of Lubbock County, and by the time dust had settled from the move, more than 100 people were living there.

Pragmatism preceded education in Lubbock. In 1891, the first school opened in a new building constructed to house a jail. The cells hadn't been installed at the time. According to records kept by the Lubbock Independent School District, it was used first by 19 students sitting at the feet of the town's only teacher, Minnie Tubbs.

Lubbock's population was reported at 283 on the 1900 census.

The Santa Fe railroad came to town in 1909, and in later years six additional lines radiated from what has become known as the Hub of the Plains.

By 1910, 1,938 people were living in Lubbock, and the following year the city launched the Lubbock Police Department by hiring its first two policemen.

Lubbock High School was built in 1910 in the 1600 block of 13th Street. It graduated five seniors in 1912 and 12 in 1913.

Lubbock seems always to have attracted foundational institutions with which to secure its future. One of the first was Texas Tech, established as Texas Technological College in 1923.

Lubbock, at least in its downtown area, had taken on all the markings of a busy city by 1942. This photo was made at Broadway and Avenue K - probably on a Saturday evening near Christmas.

Provided by Southwest Collection

"The college grew remarkably in students, faculty, and facilities, continuing its expansion through the 1930s and afterward," Carlson said.

A Lubbock Municipal Airport was built in 1930, but airline service didn't begin for another 15 years.

By World War II, the early 1940s , the Lubbock area already had two military installations: South Plains Army Airfield, a glider training base adjacent to the airport; and Lubbock Army Airfield, a conventional aircraft training facility later named Reese Air Force Base, and now Reese Technology Center.

Another pillar of Lubbock, which Gov. Preston Smith struggled successfully to obtain, involved the approval in 1969 of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center. Classes started in 1972, and construction for the main building at 3601 Fourth St. began in 1973.

Lubbock's past has not always been upbeat. It suffered a devastating tornado May 11, 1970, that took 26 lives and injured 500 people. In one night, the storm destroyed more than 1,000 homes and damaged an additional 8,000.

Trade Day in downtown Lubbock could mix cattle, people and horse-pulled buggies in 1913, a couple of decades after the first buildings were moved to the site. Those that were moved instead of being built on the site included George Singer's store and the two-story Nicolett Hotel.

Provided by Southwest Collection

Still, a pioneering spirit of resilience enabled the community to rebuild, and in the place of a residential area that had been reduced to rubble, the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center was erected.

Along with the memorial to victims of the storm, other memorials have been built also, some to recall Lubbock's beginning. An American Wind Power Center displays windmills, without which the area probably could not have been settled in the early 20th century. And a National Ranching Heritage Center has assembled buildings that once were used by this region's pioneers.

Agriculture also is documented by the American Museum of Agriculture.

Some of Lubbock's independent nature may come from the defiant character of its namesake, Thomas S. Lubbock.

The Great Plains Life Building, now Metro Tower, was constructed in 1955, and is shown receiving its nameplate after completion. The building has been the dominant feature of Lubbock's skyline for half a century.

Provided by I. G. Holmes

Lubbock the man participated in the siege of Bexar at the start of the Texas Revolution, later was imprisoned by the Mexican Army and escaped by leaping off a balcony of the prison, and subsequently became a Texas Ranger.

His life concluded as an officer in the Confederacy.

Lubbock the town doesn't seem at this time to have any conclusion on its horizon.

1876 - Texas Legislature establishes Lubbock County and names it for Thomas S. Lubbock, a former Texas Ranger and Klansman.
• 1882 - George W. Singer opens a store in Yellow House Canyon, the first store in Lubbock County.
1884: Post Office opened in Yellow House Canyon (now part of a city park)
1890 - Rival settlements built up on opposite sides of Yellow House Canyon.
• 1890 - Final town site decided for Lubbock, located about where present day Broadway and Buddy Holly Avenue intersect.
1891: Lubbock County Organized / The newspaper Lubbock Leader was founded
1891 - Present site of downtown Lubbock purchased for $1,920, and previous communities moved to the new site, creating a population of more than 100.
• 1891 - First school opened in a building constructed to house a jail.
1900: The Lubbock Avalanche newspaper is founded
1900 - Lubbock County population reaches 293 in the 1900 census.
1909: Santa Fe Railroad enters Lubbock from Plainview
1910 - Lubbock's urban population reaches 1,938 in 1910 census.
1916: First Electrical Plant started
1920 - Lubbock's population reaches 4,051 in the 1920 census.
1923: Texas Technological College is founded (later Texas Tech)
• 1930 - Lubbock Municipal Airport opened.
1936: Lubbock Lake Archeology Site is discovered
• 1940 - Lubbock's population rises to 31,853 on the 1940 census.
• 1941 - Lubbock Army Airfield, later Reese Air Force Base, established.
• 1942 - South Plains Army Air Field opened at Lubbock Municipal Airport.
• 1954 - Lubbock Public Library opens on 19th Street across from Lubbock High School.
• 1969 - Texas Tech Health Sciences Center approved.
1969: Texas Tech College becomes Texas Tech University
1972: Liquor is sold - Lubbock loses it's claim on being the largest "dry" city in the United States
• 1977 - Lubbock Memorial Civic Center opened.
• 1990 - Population of Lubbock reaches 186,206 on 1990 census.

1970--Lubbock devastated by tornado

1981--Lubbockite and Tech-ex John Hinckley, Jr. attempts to assassinate president

1988--Sighting of the Virgin Mary in Lubbock

1992--Ralph Erdmann--discredited pathologist who faked autopsies--story on 60 Minutes

1993--Marsha Sharp's Lady Raiders win national title

1998--Hampton University incident--Lubbock sued and accused of racism; case later dropped

2001--Coach Bob Knight comes to Texas Tech

2002--North Overton Project--largest gentrification project in North America

2002--Coach Bob Knight throws salad at Tech Chancellor David Smith

2003--Bubonic Plague vials missing from TTU Health Sciences Center

2003--Lubbock leads state of Texas in STD/Teen Pregnancy rates

2003--Gay/Straight Alliance denied student organization status at Lubbock High School

2006--Newborn baby kidnapped by woman disguised as nurse, returned to family

2007--Chippendales dancers spend night in jail in America's most conservative city, Lubbock, Texas.

2007--Newborn baby kidnapped by woman disguised as nurse, returned to family

2007--Lubbock's undefeated Western Little League team advances to Little League World Series U.S. final!

Deep Time & the TX High Plains - Carlson

p.96 1878 - Last bison herds on South Plains
p.97 1884 - "Across Yellowhouse canyon, including present day Lubbock, the Western Land and Livestock Company in 1884 established its IOA Fanch. The northern boundary of the ranch extended from Crosby County westward to Hockly County along present 19th Street in Lubbock."
"...grazed some twenty thousand cattle in 1885."
p.98 1883 - Singer's mercantile established in Yellowhouse Canyon.
p.101 May 1935 - excavation began on "unplugging" the springs at Lubbock Lake as part of the WPA.

LBB

LUBBOCK, TEXAS. Lubbock, the county seat of Lubbock County, is located at the approximate center of the county (at 33°35' N, 101°51' W) at an elevation of 3,256 feet above sea level. The city, the largest on the South Plains, is on Interstate Highway 27, 327 miles northwest of Dallas and 122 miles south of Amarillo. Lubbock was founded as a part of the movement westward onto the High Plains of Texas by ranchers and farmers. More directly it was the result of a compromise between two groups of town promoters, one led by Frank E. Wheelock^qv and the other by W. E. Rayner. In the fall of 1890 these groups abandoned their settlements, known respectively as Old Lubbock and Monterey, and agreed on December 19 of that year to combine into the new settlement. In 1876 the county had been named for Thomas S. Lubbock,^qv former Texas Ranger and brother of Francis R. Lubbock,^qv governor of Texas during the Civil War.^qv As early as 1884 a federal post office called Lubbock existed at George W. Singer's^qv store in Yellow House Canyon,^qv in the northern part of the present-day city.

One of the first orders of business of the town promoters was to circulate a petition for the organization of the county. At the resulting election on March 10, 1891, Lubbock was duly elected county seat, and its permanence was assured. Settlers began to arrive. The town's first newspaper, the Lubbock Leader, began publication on July 31, 1891. Within three years the town had six lawyers and as many stores, a dentist, three land agents, a livery stable, two hotels, including the Nicolett, which had been moved across the canyon from the original settlement, and the county courthouse and jail. The jail also housed the school taught by Miss Minnie Tubbs, and there the Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists had begun holding regular services by the summer of 1891. Within a few years Lubbock had already begun to establish itself as a marketing center on the South Plains. But with its dusty, unpaved streets, its scattered rows of small wooden houses, each with its own windmill, and blasted by periodic dust storms, the town had little to distinguish it from scores of other rural settlements on the plains. Then, on October 25, 1909, the Santa Fe sent its first train south from Plainview. Lubbock incorporated as a city on March 16, 1909, and by the census of 1910 had 1,938 people. The population reached 4,051 by 1920. The first hospitals, the West Texas Sanitarium and the Lubbock Sanitarium, the predecessor of Methodist Hospital, appeared in 1917. Early physicians included Marvin C. Overton, Julian T. Krueger,^qqv J. T. Hutchinson, W. L. Baugh, and C. J. Wagner.

In 1923 the legislature authorized the establishment of Texas Technological College, and Lubbock won the contest for its location. By this time the civic infrastructure was well in place. A city election in 1917 provided for a commission city government to replace the mayor and city council, and in 1918 M. S. Ruby became the first city manager. In 1916 the city council authorized the building of a city electrical plant, which in time evolved into Lubbock Power and Light. By 1930 Lubbock had three banks with deposits of more than $5 million. Much of the city's growth and prosperity depended on production from the surrounding rich agricultural area, which during the 1930s was turning increasingly to cotton and sorghum culture^qqv as irrigation^qv increased rapidly. In 1930 Lubbock had some sixty-seven wholesale outlets and an increasing number of manufacturing plants. By the 1980s it had 292 industrial establishments, including Texas Instruments,^qv Gould's Pumps, Furr's Cafeterias, and Furr's, Incorporated. Lubbock was the wholesale trade center for fifty-one counties in West Texas and eastern New Mexico and the retail center for much of the same area. The city was also the world's leader in the cottonseed industry.^qv By the 1980s Lubbock had thirteen banks with deposits approaching $1.5 billion, as well as five savings and loan companies.

Lubbock has had a newspaper throughout its history. After the Lubbock Leader was moved to Plainview in 1899, the Lubbock Avalanche was founded in 1900 and so named, editor J. J. Dillard said, because it was planned in secret so that it would hit the streets like an avalanche. The Plains Agricultural Journal began publication in 1922 and was absorbed by the Avalanche in 1926. As the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal^qv it became an evening paper under longtime editor Charles A. Guy. After 1987 the Avalanche-Journal published only a morning edition. From 1933 to 1942 H. B. Adams was editor and publisher of the Lubbock County Herald, a weekly.

Transportation improved through the years; by the 1980s four major airlines-American, America West, Delta, and Southwest-were boarding more than half a million passengers at Lubbock each year. Lubbock was still being served by the Santa Fe, although the Burlington Northern had quit the city. By 1958 Interstate Highway 27 had been opened from Amarillo, and U.S. Highway 84 ran through the city from northwest to southeast, U.S. Highway 87 ran north and south, U.S. Highway 62/82 and State Highway 114 went through east to west, and a network of farm roads served the city.

Population growth intertwined itself with economic development. In the half century after its incorporation Lubbock grew from a population of 1,938 in 1910 to 128,068 in 1960, and during the decade 1940-50 it was the second most rapidly growing city in the country, lagging behind only Albuquerque. In the 1980s Lubbock ranked as the eighth largest city in the state, with a population of 187,000. Of these 70 percent were Caucasian, 21 percent Hispanic, and 9 percent black. By 2000 the population was 199,564. Like the county, the city of Lubbock has gone from being overwhelmingly Democratic to splitting its votes between both major parties. For president the city went Republican in nine of ten elections following that of 1952, voting for a Democrat only in 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson^qv ran against Barry Goldwater. Balloting for governor and United States senator has been more evenly split, with Republicans winning six of fourteen gubernatorial races and nine of fourteen for senator. The city joined the county in supporting Republican Larry Combest for United States representative in 1984, 1986, and 1988.

From an area once called "a treeless, desolate waste of uninhabited solitude" Lubbock has grown to be a cosmopolitan, modern city. Texas Technological College became Texas Tech University in 1969 and a year later added its medical school, which grew into the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center,^qv with schools of medicine, nursing, and allied health. Added to the city's seven hospitals with more than 2,000 beds, the Health Sciences Center helped strengthen the city's status as the leading medical center on the South Plains. Reese Air Force Base^qv had by the 1980s become an important economic part of Lubbock, though in 1995 it was scheduled to be closed. Lubbock's churches grew with the city so that by the 1980s there were some 250, including a Jewish synagogue. The city has had only one saloon, and that only very briefly soon after the town was founded. Lubbock remained legally dry until an election on April 9, 1972, made liquor by the drink, but not package sales, legal, and Lubbock abandoned its distinction as the largest dry city in the country.

As Lubbock grew it had difficulty in providing educational facilities. By the late 1980s it had forty elementary schools, eight junior highs, and five senior highs, as well as a variety of industrial, technical, and private schools. Lubbock Christian College opened in September 1957 and was restructured and renamed Lubbock Christian University in 1987. The Lubbock State School^qv opened in 1969. The Lubbock Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1946 by William Harrod, who continued as its director until his retirement in 1985. He was followed briefly by Patrick Flynn and then in 1987 by Gürer Aykal. The Lubbock Civic Ballet was founded in 1969. On May 11, 1970, the city center was devastated by a tornado that took twenty-six lives and caused more than $135 million damage. The city quickly drew itself together and built a civic center, a library, and other replacements. With the Museum of Texas Tech and the Ranching Heritage Center,^qqv sixty-two parks, including Mackenzie State Recreation Area,^qv three country clubs, and four public golf courses, Lubbock is well provided with recreation and cultural activities. Its arts festival in April of each year attracts large numbers of people, as do Las Fiestas Mexicanas and Juneteenth.^qv The Lubbock Lake Site, an archeological site discovered in north Lubbock in 1936 near the site of Singer's store, has become internationally known for its unique and unbroken 11,000-year-old archeological record of early man. In 1988 it was designated the Lubbock Lake Landmark State Historical Site and subsequently the Lubbock Lake National Historic and State Archeological Landmark.^qv

BIBLIOGRAPHY: America Votes: A Handbook of Contemporary American Election Statistics (New York: Macmillan, 1956-). Lawrence L. Graves, ed., A History of Lubbock (Lubbock: West Texas Museum Association, 1962). Lawrence L. Graves, ed., Lubbock: From Town to City (Lubbock: West Texas Museum Association, 1986). Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, November 7, 1984, July 4, 1975, August 28, December 25, 1988.

Thomas Lubbock

LUBBOCK, THOMAS SALTUS (1817-1862). Thomas (some sources say Thompson) Saltus Lubbock, soldier, the son of Henry T. and Susan Ann (Saltus) Lubbock, was born on November 29, 1817, in Charleston, South Carolina. He moved to Louisiana in 1835 and worked as a cotton factor in New Orleans. When the Texas Revolution^qv started, however, he marched to Nacogdoches with Capt. William G. Cooke's^qv company of New Orleans Greys^qv and participated in the siege of Bexar.^qv Thereafter he took employment on a steamboat on the upper Brazos River and did not learn of Antonio López de Santa Anna's^qv incursion into Texas until after the battle of San Jacinto.^qv After working for a time with Samuel May Williams and Thomas F. McKinney,^qqv Lubbock joined the Texan Santa Fe expedition^qv as a lieutenant of one of the military companies. He and his men were captured in New Mexico and confined in Santiago Convent, Mexico City. Lubbock escaped by jumping from the convent's balcony and made his way back to Texas. After Adrián Woll^qv seized San Antonio in 1842, Lubbock was elected first lieutenant of Gardiner N. O. Smith's company of Harris and Milam county volunteers and, due to Smith's illness, marched at the head of the company to Bexar to join in driving the Mexicans back across the Rio Grande. Lubbock and his men were among the 189 Texans who followed Alexander Somervell^qv back to Texas on December 19, 1842, after declining to join William S. Fisher^qv on the Mier Expedition.^qv

Lubbock was a strong secessionist, characterized as a "very worthy and zealous" Knight of the Golden Circle.^qv At the beginning of the Civil War^qv he accompanied Benjamin Franklin Terry, John A. Wharton, Thomas J. Goree,^qqv and James Longstreet, who was to become the commander of I Corps of Robert E. Lee's^qv Army of Northern Virginia, from Galveston to Richmond. At the Confederate capital on June 22 or 23, 1861, he and Terry, seconded by Senator Louis T. Wigfall, Thomas N. Waul,^qqv Wharton, and Longstreet, petitioned President Jefferson Davis^qv for "authority to raise a company or battalion of guerrillas." "I must have your men," Davis reportedly replied. While in Virginia, Lubbock, Terry, and some fifteen other Texans organized themselves into an independent band of rangers to scout for the Confederate Army. Early in July, Lubbock and Terry, at the head of a company of Virginia cavalry, charged a Union camp, captured two of the enemy, wounded a third, and captured a horse and a fine Sharps rifle (see also SHARPS BUFFALO RIFLE). Only then did they realize that they were alone and that the Virginians had not followed them in their rash attack. Lubbock was still a civilian in Virginia at the time of the battle of First Bull Run or First Manassas; he "exposed his life in bearing messages during the contest." With Terry, who had also served as a volunteer aide on the battlefield, Lubbock was authorized to raise a regiment of cavalry to serve in the Confederate States Army. The two men returned to Texas and recruited the Eighth Texas Cavalry,^qv more commonly known as Terry's Texas Rangers. Terry served as the regimental colonel and Lubbock as lieutenant colonel. In poor health, Lubbock left the regiment at Nashville and never returned to it. After the death of Colonel Terry at the battle of Woodsonville, Kentucky, on December 17, 1861, Lubbock, then sick in a Bowling Green hospital, was advanced to command of the regiment, but he died in January 1862. John A. Wharton was elected colonel and John G. Walker^qv lieutenant colonel of the regiment. Lubbock was married on December 14, 1843, to Sara Anna Smith. He was, according to one of his men, "small and affable, and made a favorable impression on us." He was the brother of Texas governor Francis R. Lubbock.^qv Lubbock County was named in his honor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Leonidas B. Giles, Terry's Texas Rangers (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1911). Thomas Jewett Goree, The Thomas Jewett Goree Letters, ed. Langston James Goree V (Bryan, Texas: Family History Foundation, 1981). Jimmie Hicks, ed., "Some Letters Concerning the Knights of the Golden Circle," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 65 (July 1961). George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition (2 vols., New York: Harper, 1844; rpts. Austin: Steck, 1935; n.p.: Readex, 1966). Frances Richard Lubbock, Six Decades in Texas (Austin: Ben C. Jones, 1900; rpt., Austin: Pemberton, 1968). Thomas S. Lubbock Papers, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin. Joseph Milton Nance, Attack and Counterattack: The Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1842 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964).

County History

LUBBOCK COUNTY. Lubbock County (F-8) is located in Northwest Texas on the Southern High Plains, within the larger Great Plains of the western United States. The center of the county lies at 33°35' north latitude and 101°52' west longitude. Lubbock, its largest city, is 327 miles northwest of Dallas and 122 miles south of Amarillo. The county measures 893 square miles of flat tableland sloping gently from northwest to southeast, with elevations ranging from 2,900 to 3,400 feet. Its soils are mainly brown to reddish-brown loams and sandy loams, with smaller areas of grayish-brown, silty clay loams. These overlie a clay subsoil and, beneath that, at from two to three feet from the surface, a hardpan of caliche made of calcium carbonate. This caliche forms the Caprock,^qv which has generally prevented streams from cutting their way through the area. Beneath the caliche zone lie beds of water-filled sand of varying thickness but averaging about 300 feet; these make up a part of the great Ogallala Aquifer, formed some ten million years ago as great rivers deposited sand from the Rocky Mountains over an area extending several hundred miles east of the mountains, from what is now Canada to the South Plains of Texas. In 1968 there were 922 small, wind-scoured lakes called playas^qv dotting the county and providing refuge for wildfowl. These are formed by runoff from rainwater and range in size from less than an acre to more than fifty acres. Grasses are predominantly buffalo and blue grama, and in summer there is a profusion of wildflowers, including daisies, buttercups, verbena, and Indian paintbrush, together with scattered yucca and catclaw. Before its settlement the county was treeless, except for cottonwoods and hackberries in the canyons. In later times Chinese elms, oaks, pines, cedars, and a few other trees were introduced, along with mesquite in the nineteenth century. The county is classed as semiarid; its average annual rainfall is 18.41 inches, most of which occurs during the growing season of 208 days. The average minimum temperature in January is 25° F, and the maximum in July averages 92°.

Lubbock County is one of the oldest inhabited places in the state, if not the oldest. In the northern part of the city of Lubbock is the archeological site known as the Lubbock Lake Site, the first archeological site in Texas to be entered on the National Register of Historic Places (see LUBBOCK LAKE NATIONAL HISTORIC AND STATE ARCHEOLOGICAL LANDMARK). There, in Yellow House Canyon,^qv preserved in the twenty-foot wall of a dry lakebed, lies one of the very few known records of human habitation in Texas reaching back uninterrupted for at least 12,000 years. There Paleo-Indians camped and hunted the elephant, camel, bison, giant bear, and prehistoric horse, all long since extinct. Although the evidence is not conclusive, some authorities believe Francisco Vásquez de Coronado^qv was the first Spaniard to visit the lake, during his famous expedition of 1540. In 1629 Father Juan de Salas^qv led an expedition that went down Black Water Draw to Yellow House Canyon on its way from Santa Fe to the South Concho River. In 1650 another expedition commanded by captains Hernán Martín and Diego del Castillo^qqv used the same route, as did Capt. Diego de Guadalajara^qv four years later. Other Spanish expeditions traveled this same route and on their maps gave the name La Punta de Agua to the Lubbock Lake Site, which is now in Mackenzie State Recreation Area.^qv

From 10,000 B.C. to about A.D. 1000 the plains were inhabited by bands of Indians who lived off the land. When the Spaniards reached the plains they found tribes they called Quecheros or Teyas, probably ancestors of the Apaches. About 1700 the Comanches (from a Ute word meaning "enemy") came onto the South Plains with their newly acquired horses. They quickly came to dominate an area stretching from north of the Red River south to the Edwards Plateau,^qv westward to New Mexico, and as far east as the Brazos River. The area of West Texas including the Lubbock area was principally the domain of the Wanderers and the Penateka (Honey-Eaters) bands. The Comanches cannot be said to have been inhabitants of the Lubbock County area or of any other particular locale because, consummate horsemen that they were, they followed the buffalo^qv over a vast territory. But they did use the water holes of Yellow House Canyon as trading sites with the Comancheros,^qv traders from New Mexico, as well as on their raids into New Mexico. As the buffalo were decimated by hunters, the day of the Comanches waned. The Red River War^qv in the early 1870s ended with their defeat by the United States Army and their removal to a reservation in southeastern Oklahoma.

In the middle of the nineteenth century West Texas was considered a part of the "Great American Desert." As Capt. Randolph B. Marcy^qv remarked after a reconnaissance through the area in 1849, "not a tree, shrub, or any other object, either animate or inanimate, relieved the dreary monotony of the prospects; it was a vast illimitable expanse of desert prairie...a land where no man, either savage or civilized, permanently abides; it spreads into a treeless, desolate waste of uninhabited solitude, which always has been, and must continue, uninhabited forever." The myth dissolved in the 1870s when the region was explored by hunters who moved across the plains slaughtering the buffalo herds. Lubbock County was split off from the Bexar District by the legislature on August 21, 1876, as an unorganized county and was successively attached for administration to Young, Baylor, and Crosby counties. The census of 1880 reported twenty-five people living in the county, most of them sheep raisers from the Midwest living in Yellow House Canyon. The first semipermanent resident was a Mississippi sheepman, Zachary T. Williams, who came in the late 1870s. By about 1880 George W. Singer^qv had arrived and opened a store and post office in Yellow House Canyon.

Lubbock County was attractive to the growing number of people lured to West Texas by the favorable land laws of the state as well as by fertile soil. The census of 1890 listed only thirty-three people in the county, but after it was taken a wave of settlers in the summer and fall of that year boosted the number of county residents to about a hundred, many of them cattle raisers. Formal organization of Lubbock County came on March 10, 1891, when an election was held for the purpose and Lubbock was made the county seat. The town had been put together by a group of town promoters led by Frank E. Wheelock^qv and W. E. Rayner, who, in a burst of cooperation somewhat unusual for contending town promoters, compromised their differences and in December 1890 united their competing settlements, Monterey and old Lubbock, into the single town of Lubbock. The new county was named for Col. Thomas S. Lubbock,^qv former Texas Ranger, Confederate officer, and brother of a former governor.

At the time the county was formally organized, Lubbock was the only settlement except for Estacado, which was on the eastern boundary. During the 1890s the county grew as farmers moved out onto the plains, so that by 1900 the census reported 293 residents. With its chief asset being land, the county slowly changed its emphasis from stock raising to farming. County ranches like the IOA fell prey to drought and poor cattle prices during the nineties and began to sell off their acreages. By the first decade of the twentieth century farming was increasing rapidly. The first important crop was sorghum cane, to which 328 of the county's 400 cultivated acres was devoted in 1891; millet, wheat, and vegetables were also being cultivated on a few acres, as well as some peaches and apples. Though the dominance of cotton was far in the future, in 1901 the first crop had been grown successfully (thirty bales). In 1904 the county sent some 110 bales 100 miles to the gin in Colorado City.

In 1901 a writer characterized the South Plains as the "most alluring body of unoccupied land in the U.S.," in spite of its dryness. Lubbock County seemed destined to join its neighbors as a thinly populated farming county. Two factors intervened to change this: the coming of the railroad and Texas Tech. Shortly after 1900 railroad-promotion schemes flourished, but none became reality until the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway decided to link its two separate Texas lines and began construction from Coleman through Sweetwater, Snyder, and Lubbock to Clovis, New Mexico. The line was in operation to Lubbock by 1911. Meanwhile the Santa Fe, under the charter of a subsidiary, the Pecos and Northern Texas, built south from Plainview to Lubbock, causing a wild celebration when the first train steamed into town on September 25, 1909. Other lines soon spread through the county. In 1910 the Crosbyton-South Plains Railway opened for service between Lubbock and Crosbyton. The Santa Fe also extended its line from Slaton to Lamesa in 1910, with Slaton designated a division point. In 1925 the Santa Fe completed another extension to Levelland and then Bledsoe, to tap a large cattle-shipping and growing agricultural area. The era of railroad construction ended in 1928 with the opening of the Fort Worth and Denver South Plains Railway, a subsidiary of Burlington Northern, from Estelline in Hall County southwestward to Lubbock. With the coming of these railroads the population jumped from 3,624 in 1910 to 11,096 in 1920 and 39,104 in 1930. The other event critical to the growth of Lubbock County, the opening of Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University), occurred in 1925. The county's population was 211,651 by 1980. By contrast, no neighboring county had as many as 40,000 residents, whereas all counties in the region had populations of fewer than 10,000 in 1910.

Lubbock is primarily an agricultural county. By 1935 it had more than a half million acres in 2,652 farms. In that era, when diversified agriculture predominated in the county, wheat, grain sorghum, sheep, hogs, horses, and chickens were important. Nearly five million gallons of milk and almost 900,000 dozen eggs were produced each year, and several packing plants and creameries operated in Lubbock. Lubbock County farm production was valued at more than $32 million by 1948, when the county ranked first on the South Plains and third in the state. By the 1930s cotton culture^qv had begun its rise to become the dominant agricultural enterprise in Lubbock County, although other crops were still produced. By 1981 the county ranked third in the state, with 274,669 bales ginned by its thirty-three gins (first in the state). The county also had three cottonseed oil mills; Lubbock is recognized as the world's leading producer of cottonseed oil (see COTTONSEED INDUSTRY). Despite the dominance of cotton, other crops continued to be important to the agriculture of the county. Sorghum culture^qv became increasingly important after World War II,^qv as grain sorghum was used for cattle feed by the burgeoning feedlot industry. By 1975 more than seven million bushels was grown yearly on 100,000 acres. Although feedlots decreased in number following the decline of beef prices in the mid-1970s, almost four million bushels of sorghum was produced in 1981, with a value of $8.5 million. By then soybeans had risen in importance as a crop on county farms, although the production of milk and eggs had declined and the creameries and packing houses were gone. The Ogallala Aquifer was central to Lubbock County's growth; water from it was used for irrigation^qv of cotton, sorghum, and other grain crops. By the 1980s, after a decline because of high energy costs for pumping, the county still had some 8,500 wells irrigating more than 250,000 acres. After the 1963 cotton harvest the bracero program^qv ended in the face of mechanization. For more than twenty years the program had supplied labor by bringing in several thousand Mexican nationals each summer to pick cotton.

Lubbock is the wholesale trade area for fifty-one counties in West Texas and eastern New Mexico and is also the retailing center for much of West Texas. The county constitutes one of the twenty-eight metropolitan statistical areas^qv in the state. By the 1980s the county had retail sales of more than $1 billion annually, with wholesale sales approaching $2 billion. Lubbock was the state's leading agribusiness center and in 1982 had 292 industrial establishments employing 11,700 persons. Among major employers were Texas Instruments, Frito-Lay,^qqv Eagle-Picher Industries, and Gould's Pumps; about twenty concerns employed fifty or more persons. By the 1980s the county had sixteen commercial banks with assets of about $2.25 billion and ranked seventh in the state in that category.

For several decades after World War II, Lubbock County was one of the fastest growing counties in the state; its population increased from 101,048 in 1950 to 211,651 in 1980, when it ranked eleventh in the state, with 235.2 people to the square mile. Throughout its early years the county voted solidly Democratic. This began to change with the presidential election of 1952, when county voters supported Dwight D. Eisenhower^qv over Adlai Stevenson. Lubbock County had a Republican congressman by the 1980s and voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, and the Republican candidate for governor in 1982 and 1985; it divided its loyalty among Republican and Democratic candidates for state offices. By this time the city of Lubbock was unquestionably the dominant force in the county, with an estimated population of 187,000 in the mid-eighties, when it was the eighth-largest of Texas cities. As the only large city in the county, Lubbock dominates in many ways with its fourteen banks, fifty-one public schools, two universities (Texas Tech and Lubbock Christian), Lubbock State School,^qv seven hospitals with more than 2,000 beds, the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center,^qv more than 250 churches, more than sixty public parks (including Mackenzie State Recreation Area), the Museum of Texas Tech,^qv the Ranching Heritage Center,^qv a large public library, and an extensive business establishment with several shopping malls. Besides its two railroads the county is crossed by Interstate 27 to Amarillo, U.S. Highway 87 from the south, U.S. 84 from southeast to northwest, U.S. 62/82 from east to southwest, and a network of farm roads. Three major airlines, American (see AMR CORPORATION), Delta, and Southwest,^qv account for more than half a million passenger departures each year. The city also supports a symphony orchestra, a ballet company, and a large civic center built after the destructive tornado of May 11, 1970, which cost twenty-six lives and millions of dollars in damage. Southeast of Lubbock are Buffalo Springs Lake^qv and Lake Ransom Canyon; to the west is the Lubbock County Museum of agricultural machinery. In 1990 Lubbock County had a population of 222,636. Lubbock, with 186,206 residents, was the largest community. Other county towns are Abernathy (559 in Lubbock County, partly in Hale County), Idalou (2,074), Shallowater (1,708), Slaton (6,078), Wolfforth (1,941), Ransom Canyon (750), and New Deal (521).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lawrence L. Graves, ed., A History of Lubbock (Lubbock: West Texas Museum Association, 1962). Lawrence L. Graves, ed., Lubbock: From Town to City (Lubbock: West Texas Museum Association, 1986).

LCU

LUBBOCK CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY. Lubbock Christian University, on the western side of Lubbock, is an independent, fully accredited, private, senior institution of higher learning. It emphasizes academic quality in a Christian environment and offers more than thirty undergraduate and five graduate degrees, including preprofessional programs in medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, optometry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. Cross-enrollment agreements with Texas Tech University in Lubbock enable students to be enrolled in both schools concurrently. LCU began as a kindergarten in 1954 at the Broadway Church of Christ in downtown Lubbock. After the church had established a Bible chair at Texas Tech, it decided to establish a Christian college from the ground up by adding a grade a year through the college level. M. Norvel Young, the minister of the Broadway church, accelerated the plan by urging the Broadway elders to serve as the first board of trustees and to establish a junior college to begin in the fall of 1957. The board of trustees consisted of Paul Sherrod, J. C. Rigney, J. Don Baldridge, J. B. McCorkle, and W. T. Rogers, all prominent business and professional men in Lubbock. The board selected F. W. Mattox president, Jack Bates academic dean, Herman Wilson registrar, and Hugh Rhodes athletic director.

Lubbock Christian College opened as a junior college on September 24, 1957. Classes were conducted in several surplus military barracks that had been purchased and moved from air force bases in Lubbock and Clovis, New Mexico. The first semester 115 students enrolled. In 1972, on the fifteenth anniversary of the college, the school graduated its first senior class. In 1987, on its thirtieth anniversary, it became a university. The physical plant has expanded to twelve permanent brick buildings and several metal buildings. All the surplus military barracks have vanished from campus. One of the metal buildings houses the LCU Institute of Water Research, a scientific and agricultural project that investigates uses of the effluent water from the city of Lubbock. In 1974 the Environmental Protection Agency granted $10 million to the university to recover and use Lubbock's sewage water. The university irrigates its own 4,000-acre farm near Wilson, Texas, and studies the effects of the use of the water on the soil, on crops, and on people. The project benefits the city of Lubbock, serves as a model for other cities in handling their effluent water, and helps finance the operation of the university. The LCU athletic fieldhouse is a former hangar that was used by the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during the development of the atomic bomb. The LCU athletic director took eighteen students to Los Alamos and spent a summer disassembling the hangar and hauling it to Lubbock, in more than 150 truckloads. LCU bought the hangar from military surplus for $1,700 but spent about $200,000 to reassemble it. The fieldhouse is large enough for an oval indoor track with a 100-yard straightaway. The track encircles three basketball courts.

The university is funded by tuition and gifts of hundreds of friends, businesses, and foundations. Several multimillion-dollar gifts have come from the Mabee Foundation of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and from Ilene and Gene Hancock of Lubbock. The university primarily enrolls members of the Church of Christ^qv in West Texas and eastern New Mexico, though students from many states and foreign countries and from a variety of religions attend. Lubbock Christian University had 1,353 students in the fall of 1998. L. Ken Jones was the president.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Donald W. Whisenhunt, The Encyclopedia of Texas Colleges and Universities (Austin: Eakin, 1986).

Newspaper

LUBBOCK AVALANCHE-JOURNAL. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, a weekly paper produced by the Avalanche-Journal Publishing Company, developed from a paper known as the Avalanche, first published weekly by Thad Tubbs as early as May 4, 1900, and by Dillard and Harper from 1902 to 1909. Daily morning and evening and Sunday editions were published between 1920 and 1940, and in 1926 the paper absorbed the Plains Journal to form the Lubbock Avalanche and Plains Journal Combined. On June 29, 1959, the Lubbock Morning Avalanche and the Lubbock Evening Journal, which began publication as a daily in 1925, combined to form the daily Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, subsequently published until 1983 by Charles A. Guy. In the 1990s the paper was published by Frank Anderson and edited by Burle Pettit and had a circulation of 74,474.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Texas Newspaper Directory (Austin: Texas Press Service, 1991).