Clay Co.TXGenWeb -Historical Museum

The following is a copy of the speech given by Sam Baker Householder at the 75th Anniversary of the Byers School Reunion, June 23, 1979, entitled "How Byers Came to Be." "Museum Memories" published in Clay Co. Leader, October 2002.

"I thought of giving some of the background of how Byers came to be and how the Byers School came to be - why it was not Boyer, Texas, or Benvanue, or Acers, any of which it could have been. This is also the background of our sister town of Petrolia, which came to be in the same way.

"I do not intend to glorify the Byers Brothers, whose names appear often as involved in these events, because many, many people contributed to making Byers, who have been remembered at previous anniversaries and I hope will be in the future.

"Byers came to be in a way representative of Westward Expansion, a term which people talked and wrote about and used in political speeches and platforms for a hundred and twenty-five years. When I was a boy I was conscious people had come here from somewhere else. Everybody came here, from Kansas like the Ligons, or from Grayson County, like the Hardings, or from Hunt County, like the Shieldses, or from North Carolina, like the Dunns, or from Georgia, like the Hendersons, or from West Virginia, like the Grogans (It was Virginia when they were born there).

"Let’s begin with a couple of little children sleeping in a bed upstairs over a tavern, somewhere along the road from Western Pennsylvania to Northern Iowa. Such were the times and manners that a gun went off in the tavern below, and the bullet went through the ceiling and the bed above, passing between the sleeping children.

"The story isn’t completely clear: there is this family of five who may have been travelers stopping at the tavern. Or they may have been living there, operating the facility for a while during their westward migration across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The two barely-missed children were a boy, George, and a girl, Joey; there was another, older boy, named Walter. Their father and mother were Sam and Susan Byers. (Sam’s father, Jacob, and his grandfather had earlier joined with most of the Boyer relationship in changing the family name to Byers.)

"Now let’s come forward fifty years to the early 1900's. Sam and Susan are spending their declining years in Texas, living in a house their sons George and Walter built for them at the headquarters of their cattle and horse ranch in the northern part of Clay County. They died here at the ranch, ‘Grandpa’ Byers in 1902 and ‘Grandma’ Byers in 1907. They are buried back in Nashua, Iowa, in the territory they were headed for when the shooting incident at the tavern happened. (The little girl, Joey, grew up to become an Iowa school teacher; she married another Iowa teacher, S. B. Householder; they were Dorothy’s (Fransen) and my grandparents.)

"What happened in those 50 years between 1855 and 1905 that you and I are concerned with, that determined how Byers came to be? The Byerses reached Iowa; Samuel W. Byers went off to fight in the Union Army at the siege of Vicksburg. George W. and A. W. grew up and established business connections in Kansas City, Missouri, a new and growing city which saw its future coming from the West, and especially from the Southwest.

"The M.K. & T. Railroad was building across Kansas and the Indian Territory to Red River. Just before Christmas, 1872, the first train pulled into Denison, Texas. Now Texas cattle could be shipped north by rail instead of driven over the trails, and Texas wheat could go the same way. Lumber and supplies could come down into North Texas by the trainload.

"So early in 1873 George Byers reached North Texas, we suppose on the Katy, to look over the prospects. He reported back to Kansas City, and in 1873 he and his brother, Walter, had established the Byers Brothers hardware business in Sherman.

"Sherman was a road and railroad connection just south of Denison where things were pointing west toward the cattle country. Some of the cattle country was already being ploughed up for farms, both farmers and cattlemen needing hardware and supplies like those the Byers Brothers were selling. They sold the first barbed wire in North Texas from their hardware store in Sherman.

"Whether they intended to or not, before long they were in the cattle business, too, probably taking cattle in on trade or to liquidate debts owed the store. In the late 1870's Hence Harding and John Harding worked cattle for the Byerses in Stephens and Shackleford Counties around Fort Griffin. Then the Byers Brothers sold barbed wire on the credit to Charles F. Acers to fence a 31,000 acre pasture he was buying in and near the valley of the Big Wichita River in north Clay County. R. L. Ligon has recounted that Uncle George told him Mr. Acers couldn’t keep up the payments on the land and pay Byers Brothers for the wire. So he agreed to turn over his ranch holding for the debt if the Byers Brothers would assume all his obligations, which they did. Thus they got back the wire plus the land it went around.

"This put them in a pretty tight spot themselves, as Mr. Ligon told it. Mr. Byers said he would ride around his herd of a few hundred cattle and muse to himself, ‘This steer is mine today, but he’ll belong to the loan company tomorrow,’ because the interest on what he owed ate up one good steer every day. (Not the last cattle raiser to make that painful observation, I dare say.)

"Thus in 1884 the Byers Brothers were proprietors of a cattle and horse ranch out here where we sit today. So far as I know the first ranch building was a bunk house located out north near where the Claude Harding residence is now. There used to be a depression in their orchard where a well had been - I suspect it is still there. Our mother, Mrs. Sam (Emily) Householder, wants me to remind you in this year of anniversaries that this is the 95th anniversary of the Byers Tree Ranch."

"So, the Byers Brothers Ranch was founded in 1884; the big headquarters ranch house was built in 1892 - most of it still standing, on a slightly different location. The ‘summer house’ for the Byers Brothers’ parents was built about 1900. (It was extensively remodeled when Uncle George married in 1912.)

"Peach and apple orchards, gardens, and ornamental shrubs and trees were extensively planted under Uncle Walter’s design and direction, to show visitors what might be grown out here on the prairie, should the visitors be interested in purchasing farm land and home sites here.

"The ranch raised wheat in the big fields in the Wichita Valley, and there are spectacular photographs of rows of a dozen binders, in one field, pulled by 4-horse or 4-mule teams, supported by a regiment of drivers and wheat shockers. Such an outfit could cut, bind, and shock as much wheat then as a 12-year-old right fielder can today, eighty years later in the very same fields, cut and harvest completely with a Massey-Ferguson combine in an air-conditioned cab with the FM radio going.

"But for more than 20 years the main business of the Byers Brothers Ranch was raising cattle and horses. It had cowboys and roundups, and it branded with the Tree brand. The ranch foreman was John W. Harding, Bill’s grandfather, and ancestor of a lot of people in Clay County and elsewhere. I’d like to help somebody compile a list of the Byers Ranch cowboys - I only know of five or six: John Harding, Hence Harding, Henry Kerr (brother of Mrs. Robbie Harding and Mrs. Maty Kelley), Carroll Ferguson, and Charley Willum. Two summer cowboys were Reed Byers and Ward Byers from Kansas City, sons of Walter Byers. George Byers had no children.

"Claude Harding was the Byers Brothers’ clerk, bookkeeper and financial agent from the ranch years on through the 1930's.

"The long-range policy of the Byers Brothers was to develop their ranch, mostly pasture, for sale to home-seekers as farm and ranch land. They had the ranch surveyed and subdivided into approximately 167 tracts, or blocks, and included sites for two town, Byers and Petrolia. (Petrolia was the name of a town in that part of Pennsylvania which they had left 50 years earlier.) "They arranged with Wichita Falls capitalists and with Morgan Jones, the railroad builder, to get a 25-mile extension of the Wichita Valley Railroad built through the Dean Ranch to Petrolia and Byers. Called the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma, this railroad was built in late 1903, and a sale of town lots was planned for Byers for June 10, 1904. .Therefore, this is Byers’ birthday

"R.L. Ligon of Frederick, Oklahoma Territory, had brought a lumber yard to the town site and built Byers’ first building, a one-story frame office for the Byers Brothers, which still stands next to the new Post Office. Mr. Ligon also built a shed under which the auction would take place.

"Actually, the less said about the day Byers came to be - well, as Mr. Ligon put it in his and Ernest Ligon’s book, ‘Just Dad: Highlights of the Pioneer Days in the Middle West, 1867-1959,’ ‘The 1904 lot sale was a flop.’

"For several months the livestock market has been depressed, so that Byers Brothers had not been able to sell off their cattle and horses as rapidly as planned, to make room for the anticipated land purchasers. The only road to Byers led up from Benvanue. Long-horned steers roamed the streets and lots staked out on the prairie. Not many prospective buyers came out on the train to the sale.

"However, in the fall an intensive advertising campaign developed. Those few who were here hung on. Some more roads were built. The cattle market got better and in 1905 Byers Brothers sold much of their livestock. Land and town lot sales picked up so that by 1906 Byers was a real town, with several stores and other businesses, a doctor and drug store, a grain elevator and many houses, and a Methodist church, moved up here from Benvanue."

As a concluding element to this broad background of how Byers came to be, and to honor the Byers School Reunion which also has brought us all together here today, let me show how the new community of Byers, and the Byers Brothers, valued public education. Here in Uncle George Byers’s own handwriting is his pencil draft, probably in 1905 or early 1906, of a plan devised by him, Mr. Ligon, and perhaps others, a plan with a happy outcome:

‘For the purpose of raising a fund for the erection of a new Public School Building in the town of Byers we propose to donate a block of land 300 feet square for the location of said building and in addition thereto we will give 20 business lots, each 25 by 140 ft. and 80 residence lots, each 50 by 140 feet, which are to be sold at the uniform price of $50.00 each and the fund so raised to be used as above stated. Lots will be selected out of every block in the town plat, and are all to be subscribed for by June 25, 1906, on which date there will be a public drawing to determine the ownership of each lot. 100 tickets will be provided and each ticket will bear the number of our lot and the block in which it is located. These tickets will be put in blank envelopes after which they will be well mixed, put in a box and drawn therefore one at a time by each party as his name is called in the order that the names appear below. Payment is full to be made on or before the date of drawing.’

"May I read the list of those who subscribed $50 per lot to build this school? I think there people should be honored, and if you listen carefully, you may hear the name of an ancestor.

"J. W. Harding, J. M. King, H. S. Nail, J. H. Irwin, J. W. Herrin, G. L. Donham, Reed Byers, W. L. Bankston, J. P. Holcomb, J. B. Ingram, Sam householder, L. L. Hanna, L. C. Smyers, R. J. Dice, Thomas Warren, S. A. Grogan, Hub Stine, E. W. Grogan, P. McConville,

"E. W. Dees, L. L. Dees, J. E. Enoch, J. E. Ligon, A. F. White, E. P. Haney, Coleman L & B Co., F. B. Wyatt, W. H. Featherston, A. Newby, P. P. Langford, C. P. Bobo, J. M. Green, H. M. Rhyme, R. P. Grogan, J. L. Young, M. K. Clayton, Anderson & Patterson,

"A. W. Harbin, Davis & Simmons, Cyrus Coleman, R. L. Ligon, J. H. Fincher, H. B. Medley, Henry Davis, Lon Davis, Cobb, Bean & Stone, Horace Russell, G. W. Harding, Merchants & Planters Bank, Henrietta, T. H. Harrison, Eugene Zachry, Fred W. Householder, Mrs. A. C. Zachry, G. B. Rush.

"The plan was successful; with the $5,000 raised plus some other contributions, a two-story brick school was erected, without a cent of bonded indebtedness, in time for the 1907 term 72 years ago. In 1909 the first class graduated.

("Earl Clayton, nephew of M. K. Clayton, says this man surveyed the townsites for the Byers Brothers.")