Cole-McNeill-Jones House

The house is remembered for the herd that grew around it. James Calvin McNeill, Jr. and his wife Frances, who had married in 1900, bought this small ranch from Handy Cole and were living here by 1904, while he went on running his father's SR ranch. In 1912 he bought twenty registered Hereford cows from the estate of Charles W. Armour of Kansas City. They became the foundation of a registered herd that was still being kept in the 1980s. He called his place the Alamo Stock Farm. The house stands on private land.

What the plaque says

Cole-McNeill-Jones House Handy P. Cole (1864-1923), foreman of the Spur Ranch and later sheriff of Dickens County, bought this property in 1897. The original part of this house was built about 1900. In 1904 James Calvin McNeill, Jr. (1875-1949) bought the place and moved here from his father's adjoining ranch. In 1917 additions were made to the residence. The property was sold in 1943 to the estate of West Texas business leader Morgan Jones with an arrangement for continued occupancy by the McNeill Family. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum — 12 mi
  Crosbyton's museum of Blanco Canyon, built in 1958 as a copy of Hank Smith's Rock House, and the place to learn the canyon's 1871 fight between Mackenzie's cavalry and Quanah's Quahadi Comanche.
• Spur-Dickens County Museum — 13 mi
  Dickens County's museum on the main block of Spur, a town born on November 1, 1909, when the first train reached the land a New York syndicate was selling off from the Spur Ranch.

More markers nearby

• McNeill Ranch — 2.6 mi
• Near Site of Pansy Baptist Church — 7.7 mi
• Site of Leatherwood School — 7.7 mi
• Marshall Clinton Formby, Jr. — 8.0 mi