Farmer Community

The district the county set up in 1893, on a petition from S. D. Thornton, was legally Sonora School District Number Eight, though everyone called it Farmer after the pioneer W. W. Farmer; the name was not changed in law until 1913. By 1951 the district covered twenty-seven square miles and had built three more schools. Ima Smith taught elementary grades here for two years after 1933. J. A. Zeh ran a country store from 1925 to 1965, and a Murray Company gin of 1929 worked through the 1975 season.

What the plaque says

Farmer Community Girlhood home of Mrs. Ima Smith, First Lady of Texas, wife of Governor Preston Smith. Settlement began here in 1887. The school district was created in 1893, with its early building funded by gifts from friends, including residents of Amarillo and Colorado City. Religious faiths active in Farmer have been the Methodists (organized about 1890), Baptists (organized 1891), Presbyterians, Church of Christ, Seventh Day Adventists, and others. Service and social clubs have included P.T.A., Singsong, baseball club, Forty-two Club, Farmer Community Reunion. 1970

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum — 15 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.
• Silent Wings Museum — 23 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.
• 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.
• Slaton Harvey House — 26 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.

More markers nearby

• Cone Cemetery — 2.2 mi
• Village of Cone — 4.1 mi
• Estacado Cemetery — 7.2 mi
• John Robinson Ralls — 8.3 mi