T Anchor Ranch

The T Anchor brand came from a herd Jule Gunter brought from his Burneyville ranch in the Indian Territory; the partners dropped their GMS and Crescent G brands and adopted it. The ranch's first Herefords arrived in the spring of 1883, when Vas Stickley brought them from Dodge City. After the breakup the state bought the old headquarters and 200 acres as an experimental farm for West Texas State College. In 1975 the log headquarters, the oldest surviving Anglo structure in the Panhandle, was moved near the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and restored.

What the plaque says

T Anchor Ranch In fall 1877, Leigh and Walter Dyer and Samuel Coleman drove about 400 cattle to Spring Draw and built a two-room log cabin. The firm of Gunter, Munson & Summerfield bought their claim, and in 1880-81, cowboys built line camps and corrals and fenced 240,000 acres -- the area's first use of barbed wire. In 1882, sixteen cowboys and 125 horses herded more than 10,600 cattle in the largest drive on record. The T Anchor weathered a cowboy strike (1883), drought (1885) and blizzard (1886). British-based Cedar Valley Land and Cattle Co. bought the ranch in 1885. When Randall County organized in 1889, six of the first officers were T Anchor employees. Foreman Lee John Hutson operated remaining lands until 1902, when the land was divided into smaller ranches and farms. 175 years of Texas Independence * 1836-2011

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 1.8 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 13 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
• Cadillac Ranch — 13 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.

More markers nearby

• Col. John I. Gregg 1872 Battle Site — steps away
• Randall County — 0.7 mi
• Tex Randall — 1.6 mi
• Georgia O'Keeffe in Canyon — 1.8 mi