| 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. |
