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The
1907 Draw United Methodist Church.
Photo courtesy Regina Barnes Crutcher, 11-2003 |
History
of Draw, Texas
Excerpted from
“Out of Time”: An Informal History of Draw,
Texas
by Nolan Porterfield
In its heyday sixty years ago in the late 1940s, Draw, Texas was a
bustling, if not exactly thriving, little village of perhaps 200 people.
It boasted two general stores, a blacksmith shop, one or two cafes
(depending on the season of the year), a cotton gin, a small lumberyard,
a Methodist church, a large six-room redbrick schoolhouse with an
auditorium/gymnasium, and at least a dozen proper residential buildings,
along with various lesser dwellings -- railroad boxcars and a tin
shanty or two -- that housed gin workers and itinerants. Both general
stores also doubled as gas stations and carried a stock of hardware
goods, livestock feed, and small farm implements. To one was attached
an ice house, for the summertime storage (but not manufacture) of
block ice, which was transported from the ice plant in Tahoka. Later
a second gin was built, adjacent to the first and operated by the
same company, and in the fall ginning sometimes went on twenty-four
hours a day for several months, from September until December. In
those years of bumper cotton crops in the late 1940s, one or another
itinerant tent movie operations appeared at the beginning of the harvest
season and set up on some lot near the gin, showing old cowboy movies
and catering to both locals and the hordes of Mexican-American families
who flocked into the community to pick cotton each fall.
Today, Draw is a ghost town. The gins and all the other businesses
(and many houses) are gone; perhaps a dozen people live there, mostly
in trailers scattered among the ruins.
For many years, I felt sure that the origins of Draw were lost in
the mists of history. It was never incorporated or ever big enough
to support (or need) a newspaper or directory. In light of the general
settlement pattern on the High Plains, I simply assumed that it had
its beginnings around the time of World War I, and that anyone who
might know its history was long dead. I was wrong on both counts.
One can only wonder what life must have been like there a hundred
years ago, when Lynn County -- named for an Alamo defender -- rose
from the sovereignty of the generic Texas soil and was organized into
a political and governmental unit in 1903. (The county was created,
but not organized or settled, in 1876, coincidental with the adoption
of the constitution which governs Texas to this day. Prior to that
time, the region which became Lynn County had been a part of the Bexar
District, whose capital was San Antonio, some 300 miles away.) Growing
up there forty years later, during World War II, when the population
was at its peak and the little hamlet of Draw flourished, I can attest
to the fact that life even then was a rather lonesome and desolate
and primitive business -- no paved roads, electricity or telephones,
scarcely any indoor plumbing. On my grandparents’ farm, four and a
half miles southeast of Draw, a single cold-water pipe brought “gyp”
water from the windmill into the kitchen for cooking purposes. Even
that was a rare exception. (“Gyp” water was bitter and full of healthy
but vile-tasting minerals; our drinking water came from a rainwater
cistern, drawn up one cedar bucket at a time and placed on the kitchen
counter with a chipped porcelain dipper. Until well after World War
II, the toilet was “the little house behind the house”; baths were
taken in the kitchen in a Number 2 washtub, with water heated on the
cookstove.)
What then must the first settlers have found when a few scattered
families began to arrive around the turn of the 20th century? I asked
that question of my dear friend Fern Barnes, who has lived there most
of her eighty years. She said “Grass and rocks.” (It surely hadn’t
changed much when her familiy moved there in 1926.) To grass and rocks,
one can add a fairly thick sprinkling of mesquite trees -- although,
to borrow what a Faulkner character once said of willow trees, “a
mesquite ain’t a tree, it’s a weed.” In my time, mesquites were mostly
confined to farmers’ pasture lands and the Double U ranch not far
away. With the arrival of the first settlers, arable land was soon
“broken out” and put into cultivation for cotton and maize. I grew
up with the notion -- now apparently erroneous -- that the high plains
of Texas were originally covered in grass so tall that the Spanish
explorers, to find their way in and out, had to mark their routes
with high wooden poles -- the fabled Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain.
Now my friend Andy Wilkinson, who is an authority on all things West
Texan, tells me that it was a mistake. “Estacado,” it seems, was a
misspelling of “Estancado,” which means merely “stockaded,” an allusion
to the high vertical walls of the Caprock when approached from the
lowlands to the east. Besides, as Andy rightly points out, where would
the Spanish have found wood for stakes? Except for the scrubby native
mesquites, the Plains were essentially treeless until settlers came
and planted elms and cottonwoods and such.
The earliest evidence of Draw’s existence comes not from contemporaneous
records but from the memories of those who, fifty years later, contributed
to a history of the Methodist Church there. As
early as 1901, there existed a small building used as a school house
and located some one and a half miles northwest of the present location
of Draw. About 1904, this building was moved to a site three and a
half miles northeast of present Draw and became known as “Moore’s
Draw School House,” apparently taking its name from a geographical
feature and the otherwise unknown settler named Moore (possibly spelled
“Mooar”) who was identified with it. How “Moore’s Draw” was shortened
and moved to its present location is unknown; one can only assume
that soon afterwards there were the stirrings of some sort of commercial
activity at the crossroads of what are now the small highways designated
FM (Farm-to-Market) 213 and 1054, and those who used “Moore’s Draw
School House” as both school and church decided that was the place
to be. Obviously, the shorter version of the name followed along.
In any event, a small one-room school house was erected there in the
fall and winter of 1906-1907 (the name was now simply “Draw School
House”). It also served as a meeting place for various religious denominations,
the most prominent and active of which were the Methodists. In March
1907, a Methodist Church was formally organized, with seven charter
members, five of whom were Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Waller and their three
daughters. The others were Mrs. J. N. (“Kittie”) LeMond and Mrs. R.
A. Duckworth. Very soon other newly-arriving settlers increased their
ranks: the families of J. W. Luttrell, D. A. Shook, and D. N. Sewell,
among others.
In a memoir completed not long before his death in 1998, my uncle,
Bruce Porterfield, described what his family found when they moved
to a farm three miles southeast of Draw in late 1923 (he was then
thirteen):
Draw, Texas, at that time was something less than a Wide Place in
the Road, as it was sometimes called. On the east side of the road
[now Farm Road 1054] was Clarence Jackson’s grocery store. Behind
the store was the house he and his family lived in. And at some distance
away [to the south], the cotton gin. On the west side was the John
Berry house. Further south was the Methodist
Church with its parsonage, and beyond those the school house.
When we arrived at Draw it was “The Store.” No one ever said, “We’re
going to Draw.” It was “to The Store,” which stood on the edge of
a draw, whence the name. The draw was no more than a large shallow
depression in the flat plain. This was the Llano Estacado, where the
Spanish explorer found nothing he wanted except sticks to mark his
way out. The Store owed its existence to the presence of the cotton
gin, and the fact that it was twelve miles to either of the two towns
[O’Donnell and Tahoka]
in Lynn County.
Bruce was writing more than sixty years after he left the community,
during which time he had returned on only two or three occasions.
While I am grateful to him for that explanation of the name, I have
to take some issue with it, or at least attempt a fuller explanation.
I know of nothing even vaguely resembling a legitimate “draw” which
The Store might have stood on the edge of, although Bruce was correct
in describing it as “more than a shallow depression in the flat plain.”
The depression was (is) somewhat oblong, roughly a mile and a quarter
north to south and three-quarters of a mile east to west. Rather than
standing on the “edge” of this would-be draw, Jackson’s store and
all the other buildings that would eventually make up Draw were in
fact situated rather near center of the depression. There is a crossroad
just north of where The Store stood, and the roads leading away in
all four directions pass up a slight rise. I believe we thought of
them as “hills” when I was a boy but they would be hills only to plains
dwellers who never saw anything that could properly be called a hill.
©
Nolan Porterfield
January 25, 2005 |
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Draw-Redwine
Memorial
Photo courtesy Jimmie Crawford of Lubbock Texas and Ethel Giles of
Aurora Colorado, 8-2004 |
Draw-Redwine
Memorial
I am a grandson
of Truett and Ethel Mae Giles, who are Draw/Redwine natives (my Grandmother's
maiden name is Crawford). My Grandmother recently attended the dedication
service for the new Draw-Redwine Memorial and returned with some pictures
of the new memorial. She, along with her brother, were hoping to get
a picture of the memorial loaded onto your Draw, Texas page. - Attached
is the image of the memorial. - Ryan McIntyre, August 18 &
30, 2004 |
Draw, Texas
Forum
Thank you for
adding my "history" to the Draw page. Kudos to you for this website.
I find it especially moving that you would devote time and effort
to such an obscure (and mostly vanished) little burg as Draw, and
I express gratitude on behalf of all of us who once lived in or even
passed through that little hamlet and now years later find it embedded
in our fond memories.- Cordially, Nolan Porterfield, February 20,
2005
To share stories or photos of Draw, Texas - please contact
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