Emma

Stringfellow and Hume had bought a section of land in central Crosby County in the fall of 1890, and a post office opened that year. Their general store was the largest business in Emma, and by 1910 the town had several churches, a school, a bank and an estimated 800 people. After the 1910 vote went to Crosbyton, most residents had left by October. Business buildings and houses crossed the prairie to Crosbyton in a caravan of four engines, thirty men and twenty-two mules, and the post office moved to Ralls in 1911.

What the plaque says

Emma In the spring of 1891, merchants R.L. Stringfellow and H.E. Hume of nearby Estacado founded the town of Emma, named in honor of Stringfellow's future wife, Emma Savior (or Sevall). The two men organized a general store and laid out the townsite, which opened with a picnic and town lots sale. In the fall of that year, the county seat was moved from Estacado to Emma; residents dismantled the Estacado courthouse and moved it piece by piece to its new site on Emma's town square. Along with the courthouse came many of Estacado's businesses, including the Crosby County News, edited by J.W. Murray. Land speculators, including Julian Bassett of C.B. Livestock Co. and John R. Ralls, founder of the town of Ralls, also came to the area. During the next two decades, Emma experienced a boom. By 1910, the town had several hundred residents, supporting a post office, the Meyer Hotel and a school. That year, however, the South Plains Railroad bypassed the community by approximately five miles, traveling from Lubbock to Crosbyton. Later, Ralls became an additional stop along the railway. County residents voted in a disputed election to move the county seat to Crosbyton. Soon most of Emma's residences and businesses were moved to Crosbyton and Ralls; the old courthouse was hauled to Cedric, where it served as housing and was eventually razed. Although the area around Emma is still agricultural, the former county seat quickly became a ghost town as residents moved to other communities. Today, the Emma Cemetery is the only remaining link to the men and women who once inhabited the town. (1968, 2004)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum — 9.1 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.
• Slaton Harvey House — 19 mi
  A 1912 Santa Fe Harvey House in the railroad town of Slaton, restored as a museum, event hall and five-room inn overlooking a working BNSF yard.
• American Windmill Museum — 25 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.
• Silent Wings Museum — 26 mi
  The museum of the American combat glider pilots of World War II, in Lubbock's old airport terminal on the field where most of them earned their wings.

More markers nearby

• Emma Cemetery — 1.4 mi
• Ralls Cemetery — 3.8 mi
• John Robinson Ralls — 3.8 mi
• City of Ralls — 4.2 mi