| Like
a battered medieval castle, the empty red brick building stood for years on the
hill overlooking the West Texas oil town of Rankin
in Upton County.
The building was the old Harlan Hotel, opened for business
at the height of the oil boom as a competitor of the Yates Hotel, built by Ira
Yates, promoter of the famed Yates Oil Field.
Neither hotel succeeded
in running the other out of business - in fact, both of them eventually closed
for lack of business. But only the Yates still stands.
Rankin,
founded in 1911 after the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway bypassed the
original county seat of Upland, had no need for a large hotel until Oct. 28, 1926.
That's when the Yates No. 1-A blew in at 400 barrels a day.
By 1928 Rankin
had grown large enough to incorporate as a city. It had a new courthouse, a new
school, a busy bank, and a weekly newspaper that seldom lacked for news. Soon
Rankin also had a 46-room hotel, the three-story brick and concrete Yates.
The
hotel's grand opening in July 1929 made page-one news in Rankin and elsewhere
around the Permian Basin. The high-rise, "fire-proof" Yates Hotel billed itself
as the finest hostelry in West Texas,
at least on the left side of San
Angelo.
According to popular legend, the colorful Ira Yates and another
entrepreneur, former Upton County district clerk R.C. Harlan, had a little falling
out over something or other. Typical Texas oil baron that he was, Harlan built
the city's second large hotel and named it in his honor.
At one time,
as many as 10 hotels of sorts did a flourishing business in Rankin, but the Harlan
and Yates amounted to the Waldorf Astoria and Ritz of the town once claiming a
population of 10,000.
According to one Rankin old-timer interviewed in
the 1960s, both hotels made a lot of money for their respective owners - others
say one owner did better than the other. No matter, during the wild and wooly
boom days, neither hotel suffered for clientele.
Another local legend,
surely true, is that numerous big oil deals came to reality on the basis of a
handshake in one or the other of the hotels. And, boot-leg whiskey washing down
their gullets about as fast as oil spewed from the ground they leased, not a few
oilmen lost their proverbial shirts (and more) in friendly poker games in smoke-filled
rooms at the Harlan or Yates.
Also, as more than one Rankin resident
later admitted, numerous other activities not exactly printable took place in
the two hotels. However,
with the great boom soon a thing of the past, and oil crews moving on to new fields,
both hotels started to decline in business as Rankin dropped in population during
the Great Depression to only 672 residents by 1940. The emergence of tourist courts
- motels to a later generation - also dealt the Harlan and Yates severe blows.
The Harlan closed its doors first, followed by the Yates a few years
later.
When the Harlan went out of business, an Odessa man bought it.
He, in turn, handed it over to a Midland wrecking contractor. The company demolished
about 50 percent of the old building and then stopped for reasons local folks
never completely understood.
After 1964, only the first floor of the three-story
Harlan survived. The windows of the vacant building looked out over the one-time
boom town like hollow eyes in a crushed skull. Grass grew in the once well-trod
threshold, and fallen pieces of roofing rattled in the steady wind that blew across
the hill.
The Harlan stood like a bombed-out ruin until 1969. But civilized
societies don't leave their dead lying out in the open, and the people of Rankin
finally removed the deceased hotel from view. Today, not a brick remains.
The
Yates Hotel, though no longer accommodating landsmen and wildcatters, is now home
to the Rankin Museum. |
