M. Johnson Poultry Ranch

The Handbook of Texas says Montague County once boasted of the world's largest chicken ranch: the Johnson ranch at Bowie, with a 250,000-egg incubator, shipping White Leghorns throughout the United States and Canada. Poultry was part of the county's turn away from cotton. Cotton peaked in 1914, when forty gins processed 43,595 bales, but the boll weevil had arrived about 1910, and after the early 1930s the county never again produced 9,000 bales. Farmers turned to watermelons, tomatoes and potatoes, and in 1980 the county led Texas in apples and ranked sixth in peaches.

What the plaque says

Mose Johnson was born at New Harp (Montague Co.) In 1881, his father died when Mose was three, and his mother Sarah gave him a baby chick to teach responsibility at an early age, sparking a lifelong interest in poultry. In 1904, Mose married Mabel Jones, and the following year they began the M. Johnson Poultry Ranch with five single comb white leghorns and one rooster. The ranch's large incubator led to international shipment of day old chicks, and by 1915, the ranch covered 350 acres and was considered one of the largest enterprises of its kind. The Johnsons' 1924 home was advertised as "the house that white leghorns built." The business continued to expand in Bowie and Wichita Falls before closing after Mabel's death in 1974. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 21 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 27 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 29 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.

More markers nearby

• First National Bank of Bowie — 0.6 mi
• Montague County — 0.9 mi
• Montague Cemetery — 11 mi
• Forestburg — 17 mi