Baylor County, 1961
Underwritten by the Texas Historical Foundation
Women’s History Month is celebrated annually in March to recognize and commemorate the achievements and contributions of women to history, culture, science, and all aspects of our society. At the General Land Office, we’d like to take this opportunity to highlight the remarkable career and lasting contributions to Texas history of one of our most accomplished employees: Eltea Armstrong. Armstrong’s work over her thirty-seven years of service at the GLO remains a vital part of our map collection.
Separated out from Fannin County in 1858, Baylor County was named for Texas Ranger surgeon and U.S.-Mexican War veteran Henry W. Baylor (1818–1853). It was formally organized in 1879, and Seymour was chosen as the county seat. Baylor County consisted mainly of farms and ranches and the land was often contested in the early decades of the county’s history.[1]
On this ornately calligraphed map, Armstrong illustrates the Texas Fence Cutting Wars between ranchers and settlers of the early-1880s. The top left of the title block shows a fenced farm with the men armed as they go about their chores. A crouched man in the foreground cuts the barbed-wire fence as another man charges up the lane to the house brandishing his weapons. The right side of the map shows a band of men carrying torches to burn pastures in protest of the fenced land. They are riding away from where they’ve just set fire to a pasture and killed a longhorn.
Beginning in the 1850s, cattle drivers moved their herds out of Texas to sell. Once miners struck gold in Colorado the drovers shifted their herds north. The U. S. Civil War (1861–1865) all but halted drovers’ operations, but shortly after the war, two things helped to ignite the Texas cattle drive boom — a surplus of cattle in Texas (upwards of 250,000 head) and Philip D. Armour’s (1832–1901) opening of the Armour & Co. meatpacking plant in Chicago. For the first time, it was possible to make a large profit driving cattle north and east. [2]
Cattle drivers relied on access to open pastures for grazing along the trail. By the 1880s, farmers and ranchers in Texas had begun to fence their land with barbed-wire to establish their ownership boundaries.[3] This coupled with an 1883 drought made it more difficult for the cattlemen to find grass for their herds. The drovers, angered by this lack of open land, acted out. Half of the counties in Texas reported fence-cutting damage with losses totaling $20 million. In January 1884, Governor John Ireland (1827–1896) called a special session of the Texas legislature where they made fence cutting and pasture burning a felony, though there were still incidents as late as 1888.[4]
Reproductions of all of Eltea Armstrong’s beautifully handcrafted maps are available for purchase at the GLO Map Store.
[1] For more on Baylor County and its history see Handbook of Texas Online, Lawrence L. Graves, “Baylor County,” accessed March 09, 2017, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hcb04.
[2] For more on Philip D. Armour and Armour & Co. see http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/2554.html. For more on the post-Civil War cattle drives see http://texasalmanac.com/topics/agriculture/cattle-drives-started-earnest-after-civil-war.
[3] For more on the development and use of barbed wire see “The Rise of Barbed Wire and its Transformation of the American Frontier,” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/am485_98/cook/wire.htm.
[4] https://www.tsl.texas.gov/governors/west/ireland-fence.html
