Lubbock County History

Presented by Kiti Walton The first white settlement in Lubbock County, and in fact on the High Plains, was made in the northeast part of the county in 1879 under the leadership of Paris Cox.  He was born near Ashboro, North Carolina, October 17, 1846.  While a young man he went to Indiana where he married Mary Ferguson.  In 1875 he was operating a sawmill in Boxley, Indian, when an agent representing a Texas railroad offered to trade certificates for fifty thousand acres of unlocated lands in Texas for the sawmill and lumber business.  Cox traded “sight unseen”.  In 1878 he came to Texas to locate his land on the public domain.  He participated in a buffalo hunt and camped at Julia Lake in southeastern Hale County.  He was impressed by the soil and the vegetation of the High Plains and determined to locate his land above the Caprock.  He went to Austin and arranged to have it surveyed and recorded.  The lands were supposed to be in Crosby County.  He returned to the plains and contracted with Hank Smith to break and plant to various crops twenty-three acres of sod and to dig a well.  For digging the well Smith was to get two dollars per foot for the first fifteen feet, and five dollars a foot from there down.  All below fifteen feet was to be walled with rock.  Cox went to Indiana to get his family, and Smith went to work.  The year 1879 was seasonable and the sod land yielded an abundant harvest.  Also the well was finished when Cox returned in the fall.  With him came three other Quaker families, the Hayworths, the Stubbs, and the Sprays.  Cox built a sod house before cold weather.  The other three families passed the winter in tents.  Their suffering and tribulations were great, and when a violent sandstorm leveled their tents in March, all three families went back to where they had come from.  Paris Cox and his family stayed.  His wife was with child, and Cox sent for an old Quaker friend, Dr. William Hunt, stationed on the Osage Reservation in Indian Territory.  Dr. Hunt came, and in June 1880 delivered a girl who was named Bertha.  Due to a faulty land survey, Paris Cox’s house, his well, and his field were located in Lubbock County.  Bertha thus became the first white child to be born in Lubbock County.  Cox had land to sell, and he did not let the desertions on the part of the three families deter him from his dream of establishing a Quaker colony.  Dr. William Hunt caught the vision and went back to Indian Territory for his family.  He returned to the settlement on June 15, 1881.  Shortly afterward George Singer arrived with his family, built an adobe house and opened a store.  Back to the Main Index Page