The Spade Ranch

The brand came before the ranch. John F. Evans first used the spade on cattle gathered in Lamar County for his Donley County range in 1880, and Ellwood bought that outfit, brand and all, after the hard winters of the late 1880s. The Ellwoods fenced with six wires, set windmills every four miles and ran about 15,000 cattle, adopting Hereford bulls in 1919. J. Frank Norfleet was the first foreman. In 1924 W. L. Ellwood began selling the north range as farms; by 1938 about 189,000 acres had gone to 914 buyers, 84 percent of them Texans.

What the plaque says

The Spade Ranch [Spade brand in title] Founded by Isaac L. Ellwood (1833-1910), inventor who made a fortune in barbed wire, and bought (1889) from veteran cattlemen D. H. and J. W. Snyder an 8 x 25-mile range (128,000 acres) in Hale, Hockley, Lamb and Lubbock counties. This range was used for Spade-branded calves from Renderbrook Spring, his southmost ranch, in Mitchell County. He continued buying South Plains land until Spade Range was 54 miles long. Headquarters (originally in Lamb County) was moved to South Camp (3/10 mi. N of here) after farm-land sales in 1920s. Ellwood's descendants still own and operate the Spade. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 18 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 — 19 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.
• Buddy Holly Center — 21 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 22 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

• City of Levelland — 9.8 mi
• Fifth Street Missionary Baptist Church — 10.0 mi
• Reese Air Force Base — 10 mi
• Hockley County — 11 mi