Brooks Blacksmith Shop

The shop opened in a town still being built. In 1920 Meadow poured a twelve-foot-square concrete tank in the middle of its main street, used to water horses, cool radiators and wade in on hot days. George T. Mitchell opened a gas station that December while his wife ran a cafe, and in 1923 he built a two-story, fourteen-room hotel; a man named Nettles put up a gristmill. Meadow incorporated on March 22, 1926, and grew from 324 people in 1939 to 658 in 2000. Its monthly country music festival dates from 1973.

What the plaque says

Brooks Blacksmith Shop The town of Meadow developed in the early 20th century, moving to meet the railroad in this location in 1917. In 1922, O.L. Puthuff built a blacksmith shop on this site. By that time, brothers Leslie and Herschel F. Brooks, Alabama natives, had moved to Meadow. World War I veterans, the brothers built and implemented water drilling equipment. Leslie wed Audrey Maddox, and her father, John, bought the shop in 1923. John and Leslie became partners in the three-generation Brooks Blacksmith Shop. In the mid-1950s, Leslie's two older sons took over the business. The shop, which closed in 1996, provided vital services to area farms and ranches, and was a social gathering place for Meadow residents. (2004)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Ranching Heritage Center — 26 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Buddy Holly Center — 27 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 27 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• American Windmill Museum — 28 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.

More markers nearby

• Meadow United Methodist Church — 0.2 mi
• Route of Nolan Expedition — 3.0 mi
• Site of Primrose School — 4.9 mi
• Ropesville Resettlement Project — 5.9 mi