Parking in Parmer County

As a kid I thought calling something the ‘panhandle’ of a state was funny.

One of the older houses in Farwell

Of course, Oklahoma looked a bit like a pot with a handle, but Florida didn’t fit that image, and neither did Texas. Adults had odd ways of naming things, and this was one of their idiosyncrasies. Dave and I have driven through the Texas Panhandle lots of times, but we’ve never stopped in Parmer County and in particular Farwell. We can’t say that now.







Parmer County is a county located on the high plains of the Llano Estacado. It was originally the hunting grounds of the Apaches, but they were forced out by the Comanches and Kiowas in the late 18^th century. In 1876 the Texas legislature established Parmer County from lands

An old brick building in Parmer Counter

formerly assigned to the Bexar District. The county was named for Martin Parmer, a Texas Revolutionary war veteran. No settlement occurred in the county until 1882, but once the Anglos wanted to move in, the Native Americans were removed by the U.S. Army. Parmer County was actually entirely within the lands granted to the Chicago syndicate for the XIT Ranch in 1880. Until 1900 the entire county was only populated by XIT cowboys. The big change began in 1898 with the coming of the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway Company as it constructed its line from Amarillo to the Texas-New Mexico border. The county was finally organized in 1907.

The little town of Farwell began as a cow-camp for the XIT Ranch. The

Parmer County courthouse

XIT Ranch came about because two brothers named Farwell from Lake Forest, Illinois built the Texas state capital in exchange for 3.050,000 acres of virgin ranchland. This ranch employed 800 cowboys to build a 6,000 mile barbed wire fence to keep cattle rustlers from stealing from the herds. The first courthouse was built in 1907 at Parmerton and then moved to Friona; but the building burned. In that same year an election was held to determine which of the small towns would be the county seat. Because cowboys had no fixed address, the election was highly argued as to where they would be allowed to cast their vote. It was finally decided that residency was based on where the men did their laundry. At the time, Farwell had the only laundry, and thus collected the most votes. The 1916 Parmer County courthouse, designed by Architects Risser and Townes, is a three story building of buff-colored brick and concrete in the Classical Revival style. It sits less than 1,000 feet from the Texas-New Mexico state line. Farwell sits at the junction of two branches of the Santa Fe Railway: one toward Amarillo and the other toward Lubbock. When the XIT began selling land to settlers, they would arrive on the train from either north or south; they stayed in the Farwell Hotel and road in touring cars to see the available homestead sites. Many others arrived in covered wagons. Some settlers became dry-land farmers with small herds of cattle; they persevered through windstorms and drought, making the High Plains their home.

New Mexico state line

The boundary between Texas and New Mexico was supposed to be set at the 103^rd meridian, however the 1859 surveyors goofed. They marked the border between 2 ¼ and 3 ¾ miles too far west; this made Farwell, Texline, and a section of Glenrio appear to be in Texas. The strip of land, several hundred miles long, puts parts of the oilfields of the Permian Basin in question as to who owns it: Texas or New Mexico. Eventually the courts ruled that the land and towns are taxed and governed by Texas.

Cottontail rabbit in a small cemetery

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