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Wednesday, February 26, 1997

Display details history of ranch that built the Capitol

By MICHAEL HOLMES Associated Press Writer

AUSTIN (AP) - Wirecutters snapped through barbed wire Tuesday to open a display about the XIT Ranch, the fabled Panhandle spread that gave Texas its Capitol, crafty government financing and some serious symbols for the word "big."

"The XIT Ranch is why we have a Capitol," said Bill Green, who curated the new exhibit. "It played a pivotal part in building Texas a Capitol."

Upon admission as a state, Texas kept millions of acres of public lands, said Green, a former Capitol historian now with the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.

Land rich but cash poor, a constitutional convention in 1875 offered 3 million acres in the western Panhandle for construction of a new Capitol in Austin.

Government being government, even then, things dragged on. But in 1881, the old capitol burned - giving urgency to the need for a new building.

In 1882, the deal was done.

A Chicago company, known as the Capitol Syndicate, got the land and work began on the pink granite Capitol still in use today.

The company consisted of four partners, with brothers Charles B. and John V. Farwell later buying out the others. The ranch covered a strip of land about 200 miles long and 25 to 30 miles wide.

John Farwell traveled to England in 1885 to establish the Capitol Freehold Land & Investment Co. Ltd., which sold bonds to raise money.

"The brothers acquired the land before they had seen it. They figured 3 million acres of Texas couldn't be bad," said Walt Davis, director of the Panhandle-Plains museum that helped assemble the exhibit.

They sent a man from Chicago to survey the place. It was so large, that job took 36 days and more than 900 miles of travel. It was the first of many "bigs" attached to the XIT and Texas.

"It was huge," Davis said. "Hopefully, people will learn (from the exhibit) how big a ranch could be."

In 1885, the first cattle were driven onto the land. Eventually, the XIT herd would total 150,000 head.

The Farwells had one of the nation's biggest dry goods companies and brought a number of modern business practices to the ranch. Some worked; some may not have been so useful.

"Most ranchers just ran cattle and they didn't seem to have kept very accurate accounts," Green said.

"On the XIT, they had an elaborate system of bookkeeping. They even sent their bookkeeper down from Chicago to count the cattle," he said, although cowboys often just estimated the size of herds. "It (the count) only lasted about three days. The bookkeeper decided maybe the cowboys had something."

Beginning in 1901, the XIT lands were sold to ranchers and farmers for money to redeem to bonds. Ranching operations continued until 1912.

Two years in the making, the new exhibit includes numerous artifacts, maps, paintings, photos, a ranch checkbook, copies of books written about the XIT, a model of its Buffalo Springs headquarters, even some barbed wire.

Lacking trees for fences, the XIT had 1,500 miles of four-strand barbed wire around it and its 90 pastures, a total of 6,000 miles of wire.

In the 1880s, the XIT was the largest range in the world under fence. It covered portions of 10 counties, which apparently helped spark the legend that the XIT brand stood for "Ten in Texas." (Not true, Green says. The brand was designed to thwart rustlers by being difficult to alter.)

The Capitol the big ranch built was big, too.

Said to have been the seventh largest building in the world when completed in 1888, the building has 18 acres of floor space and a dome that reportedly stands seven feet higher than the nation's Capitol in Washington.

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Editor's Note: "XIT: The Ranch That Built the Texas Capitol," will be on display at the Capitol Complex Visitors Center through July 12.Send a Letter to the Editor about This Story | Start or Join A Discussion about This Story
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