Agriculture

Agriculture. Settled 1852. , The Lancaster area was early called "the garden spot of Texas." Without easy access to outside markets, however, the original settlers were subsistence farmers, growing what they required for food and little more. They broke the prairie sod with large, heavy "prairie" or "sod" plows, drawn by from four to six yoke of oxen, and planted corn, vegetables and, in few cases, flax and cotton for home spinning and weaving. Cotton grew well here, but there was no way to get it to market at a profit in the absence of either water or rail transportation. About 1850, however, Samual Keller, who had built a grist mill on Keller's (or Ellis's) Branch, now in East Lancaster, equipped it with the silk screens required to "bolt" ground wheat into white flour. There was a steady demand for flour in East Texas. Within a year or two the settlers, broadcasting wheat by hand, harvesting it with scythes wielded by strong arms and backs, and threshing it with flails, were hauling it in the form of flour to East Texas, returning with wagons loaded with rough sawn lumber and gold and silver money to spend at Pleasant Run, Lancaster or Dallas., With no stock laws, all crops had to be grown behind rail fences. From 1865 until the coming of barbed wire many of these were replaced by bois d' arc hedges, the evidence of these still visible in many places. On the open range cattle multiplied, and some "trail driving" from Lancaster of both cattle and horses antedated the Civil War., With the arrival of the H. and T. C. Railroad in 1872, with its depot at Hutchins, the cultivation of cotton, still "king" of all crops in the South, became a possibility, and all farmers turned to it. Gins sprang up all over the country to serve the requirements of a soil which, until depleated, yielded two and even three bales to the acre., Cotton remained the basis of the Lancaster economy for many decades. Depleted soil, the leaf worm and boll weevil, all leading to reduced production, and the price collapse accompanying the Great Depression of the 1930's, finally ended its reign as the primary crop around Lancaster. Since World War II such farmers as remain in the area dedicate their efforts to soil restoration and a more diversified agriculture.