Ozona-Barnhart Trap Company

Trail bosses settled up at the end of each night's stop. A boss counted his animals in a trap, told the company's weigher at Barnhart, Ted Adkins, and paid on the spot, five cents a head for cattle and a cent for sheep, with no paperwork. Six traps held the herds along the route, which a newspaper called the world's most unusual highway. At the railroad pens Adkins kept two lead goats, Lou and Whitney, that led sheep up the ramps into the cars for fifty cents a carload.

What the plaque says

Ozona-Barnhart Trap Company By the 1920s many ranchers in Crockett County had fenced their land, preventing their neighbors from driving sheep and cattle to the railroad shipping point in Barnhart (23 miles north of here). A solution to the problem was offered by the Ozona-Barnhart Trap Co., which was organized in Ozona in 1924. By buying or leasing land for trails, traps (small pastures), pens, and water wells, the company established a corridor through which ranchers could drive their livestock to the railroad without crossing their neighbor's fences or destroying his grass supply. The main trail extended about 34 miles, from south of Ozona to Barnhart, with branch lines throughout the county. The McNutt traps (2 miles northwest), with 1340 acres of pasture, were the hub of the trail. Sale of stock to area ranchmen financed the enterprise, and operating expenses were handled by a charge per head of livestock for services used. The O. - B. Trap Co. saved the ranching industry at a time when it was the only important business in Crockett County. The need for the trail dwindled with the rise of truck transportation in the 1930s, but drives were still held until the 1950s. The O. - B. Trap Co. now leases its land for grazing or gas production. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crockett County Museum — 8.8 mi
  Three floors of ranch-country history in Ozona, the only town in Crockett County, housed in a burned-out 1926 church rebuilt as a hospital and courthouse annex.
• Caverns of Sonora — 29 mi
  A show cave on a Sutton County ranch, opened in 1960 by cavers who wanted to stop the damage, and dense with helictites that grow sideways in every direction.

More markers nearby

• High Lonesome Stage Stand — steps away
• Ozona's Water System — 8.6 mi
• Ozona's First Water Well — 8.7 mi
• Ozona Stockman, The — 8.8 mi