Estacado is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Crosby and

Lubbock Lubbock ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the county seat of Lubbock County. With a population of 272,086 in 2024, Lubbock is the 10th-most populous city in Texas and the 84th-most populous in the United States. The city is in the ...

Counties in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its so ...

Texas Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...

. According to the

Handbook of Texas The Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) is an American nonprofit educational and research organization dedicated to documenting the history of Texas. It was founded in Austin, Texas, United States, on March 2, 1897. In November 2008, the ...

, the community had a population of 80 in 2000. It is located within the

Lubbock metropolitan area The Lubbock metropolitan area is a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in the South Plains region of West Texas, United States, that covers three counties – Crosby, Lubbock, and Lynn. As of the 2010 census, the Lubbock MSA had a population ...

History

The

South Plains The South Plains is a region in northwest Texas, United States, consisting of 24 counties. Counties The South Plains region includes 24 counties: The northernmost four (Parmer, Castro, Swisher, and Briscoe) also form part of the Texas Panhand ...

' first White farming community was called Estacado. Paris Cox founded it back in 1879. In the late 1870s, Cox had obtained railroad land in western Crosby and eastern Lubbock counties in exchange for his

sawmill A sawmill (saw mill, saw-mill) or lumber mill is a facility where logging, logs are cut into lumber. Modern sawmills use a motorized saw to cut logs lengthwise to make long pieces, and crosswise to length depending on standard or custom sizes ...

business in

Indiana Indiana ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north and northeast, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the s ...

, to establish a

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to the Religious Society of Friends, a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations. Members refer to each other as Friends after in the Bible, and originally, others referred to them as Quakers ...

colony there. The first families (surnamed Cox, Stubbs, Spray, and Hayworth) came to the area in the fall of 1879, just in time to endure a harsh winter. For his family, Cox constructed a

sod house The sod house or soddy was a common alternative to the log cabin during frontier settlement of the Great Plains of North America in the 1800s and early 1900s. Primarily used at first for animal shelters, corrals, and fences, they came into use ...

, but the other immigrants endured misery in tents and left the colony the next spring, leaving the Cox family as the only residents. However, interest in the colony was rekindled after a profitable crop was harvested, and ten families had been recruited by 1882. The town was originally known as Marietta (or Maryetta) after Cox's wife Mary. However, when the post office was created in 1884, with William Hunt serving as postmaster, the town was renamed Estacado for the nearby

Llano Estacado The Llano Estacado (), sometimes translated into English as the Staked Plains, is a region in the Southwestern United States that encompasses parts of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas. One of the largest mesas or tablelands on the North A ...

. Estacado was chosen to serve as Crosby County's county seat in 1886. After a few years of prosperity, the town's population was estimated to be 200 in 1890, but Estacado started to deteriorate when Emma took over as the county seat in 1891. Following Cox's death in 1888, the town was left without a leader, and the invasion by

grasshopper Grasshoppers are a group of insects belonging to the suborder Caelifera. They are amongst what are possibly the most ancient living groups of chewing herbivorous insects, dating back to the early Triassic around 250 million years ago. Grassh ...

s and the

drought A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions.Douville, H., K. Raghavan, J. Renwick, R.P. Allan, P.A. Arias, M. Barlow, R. Cerezo-Mota, A. Cherchi, T.Y. Gan, J. Gergis, D. Jiang, A. Khan, W. Pokam Mba, D. Rosenfeld, J. Tierney, ...

of 1892–1893 all but destroyed it. After 1900, however, the area's favorable growing conditions drew settlers, and Estacado survived despite the dissolution of the original Quaker community. After the post office closed in 1918, mail began to arrive through Petersburg. From 1930 to 1940, the population grew from 68 to 85; from 1970 to 2000, it stayed steady at 80. The community had a

cotton gin A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); ...

and some scattered homes in the middle of the 1980s.

Geography

Estacado is located on Farm to Market Road 1527 on the Crosby County line, northeast of Idalou and northeast of

in northeastern Lubbock County. In 1949, Farm to Market Road 1314 traveled through Estacado.

Education

When Emma Hunt started teaching in a dugout classroom in 1882, the hamlet offered some of the earliest organized education on the South Plains; by 1884, classes were being given in the Quaker meetinghouse. The community's first college on the Llano Estacado, Central Plains Academy, was founded in 1890 and ran for two years. Today, the community is served by the Lorenzo Independent School District.

Notable person

* Bill Standifer,

Old West The American frontier, also known as the Old West, and popularly known as the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that bega ...

lawman, worked as a Range Detective and killed a

cattle rustler Cattle raiding is the act of stealing live cattle, often several or many at once. In Australia, such stealing is often referred to as duffing, and the perpetrator as a duffer.Baker, Sidney John (1945) ''The Australian language : an examination o ...

near Estacado.

Gallery

File:Estacado Texas historical marker 2011.jpg, State historical marker erected in 1936 to mark the site of Estacado File:Estacado Cemetery Lubbock County Texas 2010.jpg, Estacado Cemetery

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Estacado, Texas Geography of Crosby County, Texas Geography of Lubbock County, Texas Populated places established in 1879 Quakerism in the United States Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks 1879 establishments in Texas