Grasslands

Handbook historian Donald R. Abbe counts Grassland as Lynn County's oldest community, grown up around the ranch headquarters of Enos and Thomas Seeds. In 1889 the ranch became the county's second post office. By 1900 the ranch had been broken up and sold to farmers, and a small cotton community with a modest ginning business slowly formed on the old site. It had seventy-six residents in 1930 and was recorded at 200 from the 1940s through the 1970s. In 1974 it still had two cotton gins, a store and a station; sixty-one people lived there in 2000.

What the plaque says

Grasslands (2 miles south) One of first land patents in South Plains, lying along a well-marked Indian trail used by explorers, U.S. Army, and (after 1880) the stages and freighters northbound from Colorado City. Grasslands Ranch (named for an estate of President Cleveland) was established 1888 by Enos L. Seeds, the 1889-1900 postmaster, who erected a fine frame house and first trading post on South Plains. Mrs. Seeds was the first permanent white woman resident in county. Nearby is grave of area's first-born white child (a son of Mr. and Mrs. Todd Wilson). Community name is now Grassland. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Garza County Historical Museum — 12 mi
  The county museum of Post, C. W. Post's planned town below the Caprock, kept in the stone sanitarium the town opened in 1912 as the best-equipped medical building west of Fort Worth.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• Dry-Land Farming — 7.0 mi
• Twin Chimneys — 11 mi
• C. W. Post Rain Battles — 11 mi
• Kate McCommis — 11 mi