Cowboys' Christmas Ball

The dance Chittenden saw was the Star Hotel's yearly Christmas dance, held to thank ranchers and cowboys for their trade, and the music came from a bass viol, a tambourine and two fiddles. Writers disagree whether the poem drew on the dance of 1885 or 1887. It reached print on June 19, 1890, after the Star Hotel had burned earlier that year. John A. Lomax included it in his 1916 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, and in 1946 the Colorado cowboy folklorist Gordon Graham set it to music and sang it at the ball.

What the plaque says

In 1885, M. G. Rhodes hosted a wedding party and dance at his Star Hotel in Anson. One guest was Larry Chittenden, a salesman and writer visiting his uncle in Jones County. He was so inspired by the dance held that night for the cowboys and ladies that he composed a poem commemorating the occasion, "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball." The poem, first printed in Anson's Texas Western Newspaper in 1890, also appeared in Chittenden's 1893 poetry collection Ranch Berses. Over the years the poem was remembered and anthologized many times in print and song. In 1934, Leonora Barrett and Hybernia Grace revived the historic ball and its folklore. Their group performed during the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas and at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C. in 1938, when they danced on the White House lawn. As annual interest increased, the group copyrighted the event and named a board of directors for the Texas Cowboys' Christmas Ball Association. A new venue, Pioneer Hall, was built in 1938-40 with help from the Work Projects Administration. The dance has been a three-day event since 1940, and the following year Jenne Magafan's mural in the Anson Post Office depicted the historic "Cowboy Dance." Chittenden's poem records real people and ranches of 1880s Jones County, along with observations of dress and customs which influence some of the formal rules and decorum of the ball today. Ladies must wear dresses and gentlemen must check their hats, and some attendees dress in period clothing. The event draws national and international visitors, while some participants are direct descendants of those immortalized in the poem. With such 19th century dances as the grand march, waltz, cotton-eye joe, polka, Virginia Reel and Schottische, this Anson tradition helps perpetuate an important aspect of life in frontier Texas. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Phantom Hill — 14 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Frontier Texas! — 23 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.

More markers nearby

• Fort Phantom Hill, C.S.A. — 0.8 mi
• Jones County — 0.8 mi
• Site of Truby School — 7.7 mi
• Neinda Community — 12 mi