The Town That Was a Refuge RoadyGoat

1856

For roughly the first twenty-five years of its existence, Weatherford served a function most towns never have to fill: it was a place to run to. Families homesteading the Parker County countryside faced the constant threat of raids during the era of intense conflict on the North Texas frontier. When danger came, settlers fled into town, where numbers and proximity to neighbors offered protection that an isolated farmstead could not. Weatherford was not just an economic center or a county seat. It was a walled-off reality in a landscape that was still, for decades, genuinely dangerous to live in.

Named for a Senator, Carved Out of a Captive's Story RoadyGoat

The county you're crossing carries one of the most haunting names in Texas. When the legislature created Parker County in 1855, it honored Isaac Parker, the state representative who introduced the bill. He was also the uncle of Cynthia Ann Parker, the little girl seized by Comanches as a child who grew up among them and became the mother of Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche war chief. The town itself was named for Thomas Jefferson Weatherford, a state senator from the Dallas district who helped pass the bill, and it was chosen as county seat by election among three sites. Incorporated in 1858 with barely 175 residents, Weatherford sat on the crest of the divide between the Trinity and Brazos valleys, the principal frontier settlement in North Texas. For its first twenty-five years it doubled as a fortified refuge, where Parker County families fled during the raids that didn't subside until the early 1870s. The name on the courthouse and the name of a captured girl spring from the same family. (Source: Handbook of Texas.)

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When Weatherford Ruled the Watermelon World RoadyGoat

Before peaches, this was watermelon country, and Weatherford did not whisper about it. The deep sandy land around town grew melons in volume, and the three railroads that reached the county between 1879 and 1891 let growers ship them everywhere. At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, twelve watermelons raised in Parker County took the world prize for sheer weight, and the town began calling itself the World's Greatest Watermelon Center. By 1925, Weatherford was the largest-volume watermelon shipping point in the entire nation. Locals leaned into the title hard, printing it on postcards and erecting a watermelon statue right on the courthouse square so no visitor could miss the boast. The melon trade eventually faded as the same growers turned increasingly to peaches, the fruit that now defines the county, but for a couple of generations a Parker County watermelon was a national bragging right hauled out of this dirt and loaded onto a boxcar. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Parker County, Handbook of Texas.)

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Ikard, Bose

1866

Bose Ikard was born a slave in July 1843 in Noxubee County, Mississippi, and became one of the most famous Black frontiersmen and traildrivers in Texas. He lived in Union Parish, Louisiana, before his master, Dr. Milton Ikard, moved to Texas in 1852. Several months later Bose helped Ikard's wife, Isabella (Tubb), move the family's belongings and five children to their new home in Lamar County and soon afterwards to Parker County. The young slave grew to adulthood with his owner's family, learning to farm, ranch, and fight Indians as the Civil War drew near. The war left Bose a free man, and in 1866 he went to work for Oliver Loving as a traildriver. After Loving was killed by Comanche Indians in New Mexico, Ikard continued in the service of Loving's partner, Charles Goodnight , for four years. The two men became lifelong friends. Goodnight later commented that he trusted Bose Ikard "farther than any living man. He was my detective, banker, and everything else in Colorado, New Mexico, and the other wild country I was in." In 1869 Ikard wanted to settle in Colorado, but Goodnight persuaded him to buy a farm in Parker County, Texas, because there were so few Blacks in Colorado. Ikard settled in Weatherford and began his family at a time when Indian attacks were still common in North Texas. In 1869 he participated in a running battle with Quanah Parker 's Comanche band, riding alongside his former master, Milton Ikard. Bose married a woman named Angelina in 1869 or 1870, and they had fifteen children. In his later years he attended several cowboy reunions. Goodnight visited him in Weatherford whenever the opportunity arose and gave him presents of money. Ikard died in Austin on January 4, 1929. After his burial in Greenwood Cemetery, Weatherford, Goodnight bought a granite marker and wrote an epitaph for his old friend: "Bose Ikard served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches, splendid behavior."

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Loving, Oliver

1845

Founder of three major cattle trails, Oliver Loving came from Kentucky to Texas in 1845 and to Parker County about 1855. During the Civil War (1861-65), he supplied beef to Confederate forces. With Charles Goodnight as partner on a drive to New Mexico, Loving scouted ahead of the cattle, was badly wounded by Indians, lay five days without food before his rescue, and died of gangrene on September 25, 1867. His dying wish was fulfilled when his son Joseph joined Goodnight to bring the body 600 miles by wagon for burial in this county. Recorded, 1977.

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Old City Greenwood Cemetery

1863

This cemetery was formally established by the Weatherford town council in 1863 when lots were surveyed and the exact cemetery location was staked. Previous interments were made in the unmarked streets of the town. The mayor directed those remains be moved to the new cemetery. Historian H. Smythe noted in 1877 that the cemetery was a "sadly neglected spot," without a fence. By 1925 the civic league and cemetery association had been formed. The accomplishments of its women members were many. In addition to site beautification, the driveways were widened and graveled. A water well and windmill were installed, and a sexton was employed to secure the grounds. Cemetery care declined in the 1930's and later. Among the estimated 1,000 graves are Civil War medal of honor recipient Chester Bowen; trail drivers Oliver Loving and Boze Ikard; cattleman and founder of the Citizens National Bank J.R. Couts; Governor of Texas (1902-06) S.W.T. Lanham and his son, congressman Fritz G. Lanham; veterans of many wars; and pioneers of early Texas history. Restoration of the cemetery began in the late 1980's. The site continues to serve the area. (1996)

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Baylor, George Wythe

1860

George Wythe Baylor, Confederate military officer and Texas Ranger, the son of John Walker Baylor , was born in Fort Gibson, Cherokee Nation, on August 2, 1832. On June 5, 1860, Baylor, then living in Weatherford with John R. Baylor and others, ran down a party of Indian raiders on Paint Creek in Parker County and killed and scalped nine of them. Baylor is reputed to have raised the first Confederate flag in Austin. He was commissioned a first lieutenant in Company H of the Second Cavalry, John Robert Baylor's Arizona Brigade, and served as regimental adjutant before resigning to become senior aide-de-camp to Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston in August or September 1861. After Johnston's death at the battle of Shiloh, Tennessee, on April 6, 1862, Baylor returned to Texas and was elected lieutenant colonel and commander of the Second Battalion of Henry H. Sibley 's army. When the battalion merged with the Second Cavalry regiment of the Arizona Brigade, Baylor was elected its colonel. He also commanded a regiment of cavalry during the Red River campaign of 1864 and was commended for gallantry at the battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. On April 6, 1865, at the headquarters of Gen. John B. Magruder in the Fannin Hotel in Galveston, Baylor quarreled with and killed fellow staff officer John Austin Wharton . Their fight was said to have been about "military matters," specifically the reorganization of the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederate States. Wharton reportedly slapped Baylor's face and called him a liar, whereupon Baylor drew his revolver and shot the unarmed Wharton. Baylor later said that the incident had a been a "lifelong sorrow" to him. After the Civil War , when Lt. John B. Tays, commander of Company C, Frontier Battalion of Texas Rangers in El Paso, resigned to enter the customs service, Baylor was commissioned a first lieutenant and appointed to take his place. At this time, according to Walter Prescott Webb , Baylor "was in his prime, forty-seven years of age, six feet two inches, a fine type of the frontier gentleman. He had a fair education, a flair for writing for newspapers and an inclination to fill his reports with historical allusions." Baylor left San Antonio on August 2, 1879, with his wife, two young daughters, and a sister-in-law, riding in an ambulance and with two wagons full of provisions and household goods, the latter including a piano and a game cock and four hens. The caravan, guarded by Sgt. James B. Gillett and five other rangers, was forty-two days on the road to Ysleta, where Baylor established his headquarters. From there he opened his campaign against raiding Apaches, whom he often pursued beyond the Rio Grande, in cooperation with Mexican officials. Soon after arriving on the border Baylor "generously extended" to the Mexican government "the privilege of coming over on our side and killing all the Reservation Indians" they could find. Through the rest of 1879 and most of 1880 Baylor's rangers were occupied in the pursuit of the Mescalero Apache chief Victorio and his band, an endeavor that proved largely ineffective. In September 1880 Baylor was transferred and promoted to captain of Company A. In 1882 he was promoted to major and given command of several ranger companies. During this period he was active in the fence-cutting conflict in Nolan County. After resigning from ranger service in 1885 Baylor was elected to the Texas House of Representatives from El Paso and served as clerk of the district and circuit courts for a number of years. He died at San Antonio on March 17, 1916, and was buried in the Confederate Cemetery there. Baylor, according to Wilburn Hill King , the nineteenth-century historian of the rangers, was "noted for excellence of personal character and conduct, and soldierly courage and zeal," but Webb, more reserved in his judgment, wrote that "though a courageous individual fighter," Baylor "lacked reserve, was a poor disciplinarian, and an indifferent judge of me

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Obenchain, Alfred T.

1861

Alfred T. Obenchain, planter, state senator, and Confederate officer, was born on February 11, 1824, in Buchanan, Virginia, to Samuel and Martha (Toller) Obenchain. On May 15, 1847, Obenchain married his first wife, Susan Fluke, in Botetourt, Virginia. He and his second wife, Delphine R. Beckwith (1831-1906), were married in 1850 in Hancock County, Illinois. The couple had five children. Later, Obenchain settled with his family in Parker County, Texas, where he became a leading citizen. By 1860 he owned $8,500 in real estate and personal property, including a plantation consisting of 905 acres of land and six slaves. In October 1860 Obenchain became part owner of the Weatherford newspaper White Man , a publication that was hostile towards Indians . The paper remained in operation until its office was destroyed in December 1861. Earlier that year, Obenchain had represented Parker County at the Texas Secession Convention , and on February 1, 1861, was one of the signers of the Texas Secession Ordinance. From November 4, 1861, to January 14, 1862, Obenchain served as senator in the Ninth Texas Legislature for District 20, which represented Erath, Johnson, Palo Pinto, Parker, and Tarrant counties. On January 29, 1862, Obenchain was excused as a senator and appointed by Gov. Francis R. Lubbock as lieutenant colonel and second-in-command to Col. James M. Norris in the Texas Frontier Regiment . Norris soon tired of the strain of military command, however, and returned to his law practice in McLennan County. Lieutenant Colonel Obenchain took over the force at Fort Belknap and caused controversy due to his lack of understanding of the frontier and his strict discipline. Charles Goodnight , an officer under his command, described him as "tyrannical and arrogant." This unpopularity led to his murder by two of his own men at Hubbard Creek in Stephens County near Camp Breckenridge on August 16, 1862. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the frontier.

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Weatherford

1856

Founded 1856. Named for Jefferson Weatherford, state senator and a confederate soldier. Frontier people found protection here from constant Indian threat during Civil War. Long the only town between Fort Worth and El Paso. Home of Chandor Gardens and Texas Railroad Museum. Nearby is Double Log Cabin Museum. (1964)

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Weatherford, Texas

Music in Weatherford

Songs About Weatherford

Artists From Weatherford

Rivers & Roads in Song near Weatherford

History of Weatherford

The Town That Was a Refuge RoadyGoat

Named for a Senator, Carved Out of a Captive's Story RoadyGoat

When Weatherford Ruled the Watermelon World RoadyGoat

Ikard, Bose

Loving, Oliver

Old City Greenwood Cemetery

Baylor, George Wythe

Obenchain, Alfred T.

Weatherford

Things to Do in Weatherford

Everything Near Weatherford