Name: Lampasas, Texas
Address: Lampasas, TX

Lampasas, TX RoadyGoat

Lampasas is more than just a peaceful little town in the heart of Texas, it’s a place that’s quietly nurtured some remarkable talent.

The Gunfight in the Square RoadyGoat

Imagine the courthouse square, not with boutiques, but with armed men facing off in the street. That was the scene here on June 7th, 1877, the biggest day of the Horrell-Higgins Feud. The Horrell brothers were local ranchers with a long reputation for violence — four years earlier they'd shot up a Texas State Police detachment in a Lampasas saloon, killing a captain and three of his men, and walked when a local jury acquitted them. Their enemy was Pink Higgins, a cattleman and trail driver who accused them of stealing his stock and who had already killed Merritt Horrell in the Gem Saloon that January. Higgins rode in that day with his brothers-in-law Bob Mitchell and Ben Terry, along with Frank Mitchell and Bill Wren. The Horrells and their friends were already waiting on the square. Nobody knows who fired first. When the smoke cleared, one man from each side was dead — Frank Mitchell for the Higginses, and a Horrell rider named Jim Buck Miller who went by Palmer. Bill Wren was shot but lived, and it was townspeople stepping in that finally got both sides to quit firing. It took Texas Ranger Major John B. Jones and a company of Rangers to end the feud for good that August.

RoadyGoat →

The Day the Creek Rose RoadyGoat

Sulphur Creek usually flows gently through Lampasas, but on Mother's Day, May 12, 1957, it became a monster. After a cloudburst dropped more than eight inches of rain between about six-thirty and eleven that night, a dirt levee gave way and the creek burst its banks. Water ran five to eight feet deep through the heart of downtown. It swept away houses, tossed cars like toys, and tore through sixty-eight blocks of town, wrecking thirty-eight homes and five businesses. The floodwaters rose so fast that many people were trapped. Despite heroic rescue efforts, five people lost their lives. The disaster caused millions of dollars in damage and left a deep scar on the community. The 1957 flood was a turning point for Lampasas — state and federal agencies came in and built flood-control dams upstream of town, and Lampasas has not seen a flood like it since.

RoadyGoat →

Horrell-Higgins Feud

1873

The Horrell and Higgins families were ranchers who settled in Lampasas County before the Civil War and were friends and neighbors until the 1870s. The five Horrell brothers-Mart, Tom, Merritt, Ben, and Sam-first got into trouble with the State Police in 1873, when Capt. Thomas Williams and seven men went to Lampasas to put a stop to the general lawlessness prevalent there. Williams fought with the Horrell boys and their brother-in-law, Bill Bowen, in Jerry Scott's saloon. When the fight was over, four state policemen were dead. Mart Horrell, badly wounded, was confined in the Georgetown jail, but as soon as he was well enough his brothers helped him to break out. The Horrells remained in the Lampasas area for several more months, gathered a herd of cattle, and then headed for New Mexico. They settled in the Ruidoso country west of Roswell and immediately got into more trouble. Conflicting tales are told about the beginning of the affair known in New Mexico as the Horrell War, but all agree that it was brief and bloody. At least seventeen men were killed, including Ben Horrell and a brother-in-law named Ben Turner. Eventually, followed for a long distance by the angry New Mexicans, the Horrells returned to Texas. They reached Lampasas near the end of February 1874, surrendered to the authorities, and were tried for the murder of Thomas Williams and acquitted. The brothers resettled in various parts of Lampasas County. Sam lived about seventeen miles north of Lampasas near Simms Creek, Tom had some property about seven miles north of Lampasas, and Mart lived southeast of Lampasas near the Burnet County line. At some time during the next two years they quarreled with their former neighbor John Pinckney Calhoun (Pink) Higgins, who accused them of stealing his stock. On January 22, 1877, Pink Higgins shot and killed Merritt Horrell in Wiley and Toland's Gem Saloon in Lampasas. Legend claims that this was the same saloon where the four State Police were killed in 1873. The three remaining Horrells were determined to call to account Higgins, his brother-in-law Bob Mitchell, and his friend Bill Wren. On March 26, as Tom and Mart Horrell were on their way to attend a session of Judge W. A. Blackburn's court, they were waylaid four miles east of Lampasas by the Higgins party, which was concealed along the banks of a creek known today as Battle Branch. Tom was knocked out of his saddle, badly hurt. Mart, less seriously hit, stopped his frightened horse, dismounted under fire, and ran off the attackers singlehandedly. The next battle was apparently accidental. It occurred on June 7, three days after the Lampasas County Courthouse had been burglarized and district court records were destroyed, including the bonds of Pink Higgins and Bob Mitchell. Both factions happened to be in Lampasas that morning, when fighting broke out in the streets. Bill Wren was painfully wounded, and Frank Mitchell, Bob's brother and the cousin of Pink Higgins's wife, was killed. Jim Buck Miller, alias Palmer or Waldrup, a newcomer to the Horrell gang, was also killed. Finally the citizens were able to persuade the clans to cease firing and get out of town. As usual, the Texas Rangers had to be called in to keep the factions from exterminating each other. A detachment surprised the Horrells in their beds and persuaded them to submit to arrest. Maj. John B. Jones got the two sides to agree to stop the fighting. Early in August they signed a pair of unusual documents, still preserved in the adjutant general's papers, in which they agreed to regard the feud as "a by gone thing." Many western historians think this might have been the final settlement of the Horrell-Higgins feud, but the actual end may have come in the following year. In 1878 Tom and Mart Horrell were suspected, rightly or wrongly, of complicity in the robbery and murder of a country storekeeper in the southwestern part of Bosque County. They were eventually shot to death by a vigilante mob while being

Tsha Handbook →

Gunfight at the Lampasas Saloon

1873

In the early 1870s Lampasas was a wild frontier town. In January 1873 Sheriff S.T. Denson was shot while arresting brothers Wash and Mark Short. The district judge sent men to apprehend the Short brothers, but the posse was stopped by Ben, Tom, and Mart Horrell and several others. Sheriff Denson and the justices of the peace of Lampasas County appealed to Governor Edmund J. Davis for the assistance of the State Police. On February 10, Governor Davis issued a proclamation prohibiting the carrying of sidearms in Lampasas. On March 14, Captain Thomas Williams and seven state policemen entered Lampasas to enforce the proclamation. The State Police immediately arrested Bill Bowen for carrying a gun in town. Bowen persuaded Captain Williams and two of his men to enter Jerry Scott's Lampasas Saloon, this led to a gunfight between the State Police and the Horrell brothers and their associates. Three officers were killed in the saloon and a fourth was fatally wounded while trying to escape. The police were buried in Lampasas, but Captain Williams was reinterred in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. More State Police came to Lampasas and joined forces with the sheriff and Lampasas and Burnet County Minute Men companies to search for the Horrell Gang. They arrested four men connected with the incident. In early May the Horrell gang attacked the Georgetown Jail and released Mart Horrell and Jerry Scott form custody. The Horrell gang remained in the Lampasas area until September when they left for New Mexico. In 1874 they returned to Lampasas. In 1876 the Horrell brothers stood trial for the murder of the State Police, but were found not guilty. (2000)

Historical Marker →

Beeman, James Jackson

1840

(December 21, 1816 - December 7, 1888) One of the first settlers in Dallas and Weatherford. Born in Madison County, Ill., came to Texas 1840. He helped cut first road in Trinity Bottoms, name Turtle Creek (1841), and plat city of Dallas, 1842. He guided Texas President Sam Houston to Indian parley, 1843; joined California Gold Rush, 1849; pioneered, Parker County, 1854; aided in rescue of Comanche captive Cynthia Ann Parker, 1860. Returned to Dallas to live, 1864. Died in Lampasas.

Historical Marker →

Hughes, Moses

1835

Moses Hughes, Lampasas County pioneer, miller, soldier, and farmer, was born in South Carolina on August 23, 1819, to Bradford and Rebecca (Dobbins) Hughes. When he was very young, the Hughes family moved to Alabama following its recent statehood and hoped to cultivate cotton on the newly available farmland. In 1834, when Moses Hughes was fifteen, seventy related individuals, including his immediate family, were caught up in the G.T.T. (Gone to Texas) movement of pioneer migration and left Talladega County, Alabama. Hughes later recalled, "We had with us tradesmen of all kinds-millwrights, wagonmakers, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, shoe and hatmakers. The most of the others were farmers." The great attraction of Texas in 1834 was the vast amount of land. Under the federal Land Act of 1820, an American farmer who moved west could purchase eighty acres of public land for $100, but if he moved to Mexican Texas , he could qualify for as much as 4,605 acres ( see MEXICAN COLONIZATION LAWS ). The Hughes family arrived in Texas in January 1835 and settled near Washington (later known as Washington-on-the-Brazos). In the spring of 1836 the Hughes family participated in the Runaway Scrape , the desperate retreat from Santa Anna 's invading army. In a letter written on January 25, 1885, Hughes described the event. "...the news came to us at night, and by sunup we were on the march. We had only one little Spanish mare, and we packed her up with one bed, some quilts and warm clothing....We went as far as the Neches River...." After Sam Houston 's victory at San Jacinto , Bradford Hughes produced a corn crop on the Neches River, and the following fall, the Hughes family returned to the lands near the townsite of Washington. In 1837 Moses Hughes and his parents were among the eight charter members of the first Baptist church west of the Trinity River, organized at Washington by Baptist missionary Z. N. Morrell . In 1838 the Hughes family moved to Burleson County. On January 29, 1840, Moses Hughes married sixteen-year-old Hannah Berry in Burleson County. The couple had up to twelve children. In 1847 they moved to the Central Texas region that would become Williamson County, where Hughes's now widowed mother and other family members resided. The 1850 census recorded Moses Hughes as a farmer. Concerned about his wife's declining health, Hughes left Williamson County in November 1853 and moved to present-day Lampasas County to seek treatment from medicinal springs in the region. The family was accompanied by Hughes's brother, Nimrod, and his family, as well as their widowed mother, and eventually settled along Sulphur Creek which is fed by a number of springs. By the mid-1850s Moses Hughes had built a mill, one of the first structures in the Lampasas area and one of the county's first important businesses, on Sulphur Creek. His wife's health improved, and the region around Lampasas later earned the reputation as a health resort for its mineral waters. One of the sulphur springs was named Hughes Springs and in 1936 received a Texas Centennial Marker in honor of Moses Hughes, the "first settler in [the] vicinity." In 1856 Hughes constructed a two-story native stone residence seven miles west of town on a thirty-acre tract acquired from Thomas B. Huling . This site was adjacent to an additional 160 acres already owned by Moses. The house was strategically positioned near a creek, later designated Hughes Creek. The first power plant was established at Hughes Mill in 1890. In the 1850s and 1860s settlers in Lampasas County faced difficulties due to Comanche raids and established the Lampasas Guards, an outfit to maintain law and order, on July 1, 1859. Later that year Hughes was elected a first lieutenant of Scout No. 2 of the Lampasas Guards and later led a minuteman company under Capt. H. Ryan in 1860. In the 1860 agricultural census, farmer Moses Hughes reported having 100 horses, 100 milch cattle, six working cattle, 200 other cattle, 100 swine, and 6

Tsha Handbook →

Lampasas - Healing Springs

1853

Lampasas was a health resort destination in the 1800s, drawing visitors to its sulphur springs. It was also a frontier town with a reputation for outlaws and the Horrell-Higgins feud.

Lampasas, Texas

Music in Lampasas

Songs About Lampasas

Artists From Lampasas

Rivers & Roads in Song near Lampasas

History of Lampasas