Struve Family Businesses

The Struves arrived as Abernathy was filling in. By 1914 the town had about 300 people, four churches, several stores and a bank, and by 1926, two years after incorporation, it had forty-five businesses and about 1,500 people and was known as a cotton and grain center. A flour mill opened in the early 1920s and ran until a fire in 1934 or 1935. The town got electricity in 1929 and 1930 and a public water system in 1934, though its population fell to about 850 by 1930.

What the plaque says

Struve Family Businesses Fritz W. Struve (1877-1959) came here from Burnet County in 1912, 3 years after city was founded, started a grocery store; was joined by brother Ben F. (1879-1947) in 1918. Family operated wide variety of businesses vital to the early economic success of the community: grocery (1912-1962), hardware (1913- ), implements (1913- ), dry goods (1918- ), tin shop (?-1923), cheese factory (1929-1951). The cheese enterprise was unique to this region, producing an average of 1800 pounds per day. Fritz W. Struve was elected as first mayor in 1924, serving 3 terms in that office. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Silent Wings Museum — 12 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.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 15 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 17 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• American Windmill Museum — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Town of Abernathy — steps away
• Pearce Chapel-Strip Cemetery — 4.3 mi
• New Deal — 7.1 mi
• County Line Community — 11 mi