Pitchfork Ranch

The brand gave the ranch its name: three prongs drawn like a pitchfork. D. B. Gardner and J. S. Godwin bought the brand and range in 1881, and Godwin sold his share the next year to Eugene Williams of St. Louis. Gardner was general manager of the company from its 1883 organization, and fencing began in 1887; after his death in 1928, O. A. Lambert took over. Oil drilling started in the early 1900s. Virgil Parr and D. Burnet managed it later, and the ranch became known for championship quarter horses. The headquarters stands on private land.

What the plaque says

Pitchfork Ranch Irish-born, Jerry Savage established an open range ranch at this site about 1879. In 1881, St. Louis businessman Eugene F. Williams and Texas cattleman Dan B. Gardner purchased the ranch and in 1883 joined forces with landholder Sam Lazarus to form the Pitchfork Land & Cattle Company, Inc. Williams' heirs later acquired controlling interest of the cattle empire. The first structures here were dugouts in the river bank, while the present buildings date from 1902. Pitchfork Ranch has doubled its original size to 165,000 acres and now operates ranches in Kansas and Wyoming. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 6666 Supply House — 12 mi
  The Four Sixes Ranch's store in Guthrie, where Burk Burnett kept his office and bed, still the town's only shop and now a stop for travelers from as far as Australia.
• Spur-Dickens County Museum — 20 mi
  Dickens County's museum on the main block of Spur, a town born on November 1, 1909, when the first train reached the land a New York syndicate was selling off from the Spur Ranch.

More markers nearby

• Leo Roark — 13 mi
• Dickens Cemetery — 17 mi
• Dickens Springs — 17 mi
• Dickens County — 18 mi