Lyndon B. Johnson. The diary, focusing on Watt's life from 1951 to 1980, contains Watt's records of the number and kind of cattle, the work completed on them, the pasture they were moved to, and their sale price. Also Watt recorded the weather at Lambshead, the names of visitors, and the parties, with the names and number of people who attended. At times, Watt referred to the diary to refresh his memory or settle factual disputes. Frances Mayhugh Holden's introduction.

Records one woman's response to pioneer life in Texas at the turn of the century.

The TSHA is pleased to announce the return of a classic in this second edition of Watt Matthews of Lambshead by renowned photographer Laura Wilson. In this new edition, Wilson adds an afterword to her original award-winning photographic essay, published in 1989 when Watt Matthews was ninety years old and the vital force behind a vast West Texas ranch. Watt was the ninth and last child of pioneering parents who had established the ranch on the banks of the Clear Fork of the Brazos in 1858, and, in the words of historian David McCullough, "created a family kingdom so large and still so true to its traditional way of life that visitors sometimes have to remind themselves that it is all real." Except for four years at Princeton, Watt spent his entire life on the ranch, which had remained its own separate world into the late twentieth century. Those days are beautifully chronicled in Wilson's photographs and, in this new edition, she brings the story of Lambshead Ranch up to the present by writing of Watt's funeral and what has happened to the ranch since Watt's death in 1997.

The history of Lambshead Ranch which is located in Throckmorton and Shackelford counties, Texas. The Lambshead Ranch area was occupied by several persons, including Randolph March, Robert Neighbors, and Jesse Stem, an Indian agent, who established an Indian agency there. Stem was killed by Indians, and his wife oversaw expansion of the ranch. The ranch is named for Thomas Lambshead, born in 1805 in England, who emigrated to Texas around 1847. Thomas bought land in the nearby Round Mountain Creek area. Whether Thomas ever lived on Lambshead is not known. John A. Matthews located on Lambshead in 1897, and brought his family to the ranch in 1915.

Traces the history and present-day operation of twelve prominent Texas ranches.

In 1846, James Boyd Hawkins, his wife Ariella, and their young children left North Carolina to establish a sugar plantation in Matagorda County, in the Texas coastal bend. In The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present, Margaret Lewis Furse, a great-granddaughter of James B. and Ariella Hawkins and an active partner in today’s Hawkins Ranch, has mined public records, family archives, and her own childhood memories to compose this sweeping portrait of more than 160 years of plantation, ranch, and small-town life. Letters sent by the Hawkinses from the Texas plantation to their North Carolina family in the mid-nineteenth century describe sugar making, the perils of cholera and fevers, the activities of children, and the “management” of slaves. Public records and personal papers reveal the experience of the Hawkins family during the Civil War, when J. B. Hawkins sold goods to the Confederacy and helped with Confederate coastal defenses near his plantation. In the 1930s, the death of their parents left the ranch in the hands of four sisters, at a time when few women owned and ran cattle operations. The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present offers a panoramic view of agrarian lifeways and how they must adapt to changing times.

The Lazy S Ranch, one of the last major ranches to be established in Texas, came into being at a time when most of the other great ranches were disappearing. Founded in 1898 by Dallas banker and rancher Colonel Christopher Columbus Slaughter, the Lazy S grew to comprise nearly 250,000 acres of the western High Plains in Cochran and Hockley counties, much of which lay in a single contiguous pasture of more than 180,000 acres. Even with careful investment and management, C. C. Slaughter faced many challenges putting together an extensive ranch amid the development of the farmers’ frontier on the high plains. Within a decade, he crafted the Lazy S to become a showplace for well-bred cattle, effective range management, and efficient utilization of limited water resources. He created a working ranch that would serve as a long-lasting legacy for his wife and nine children, to remain “undivided and indivisible.” But shortly after his death in 1919, the family drained its resources, drove it into debt, then divided the land ten ways. In the 1930s, good fortune returned to some of the Slaughter heirs with the discovery of oil on the family lands. Though the Lazy S Ranch was soon forgotten, the breakup of the ranch spurred a new era for the western Llano Estacado and led to the establishment of a county, growth of four new towns, and a railroad across the heart of the ranch, fostered for the most part by the land development projects of Slaughter’s descendants. Here, David J. Murrah covers the entire, fascinating history in The Rise and Fall of the Lazy S Ranch.