Ghost Towns of Route 66 (13 page)
Read Ghost Towns of Route 66 Online
Authors: Jim Hinckley
Less than a dozen miles to the west lies the old town of Alanreed, another victim of changing times. As of 2001, the population hovered at fifty residents.
The town site in the basin of McClellan Creek six miles north of present-day Alanreed, selected in 1881, was centrally located on the busy stage and freight road that connected Mobeetie to Clarendon. Oddly enough, it would be three years before the Clarendon Land & Cattle Company began selling lots.
When surveys in 1900 made it apparent that the Choctaw, Oklahoma, & Texas Railroad would miss the little community, the platting of a new community commenced. The following year, the school opened, and the year after this, the post office transferred to the new location.
By 1904, Alanreed was the largest community in Gray County, and by the mid-teens, all indications were that this town was a rising star. The community had a bank, a hotel, a depot, churches, saloons, grocery and hardware stores, and a livery stable and blacksmith shop.
In the early 1920s, oil replaced water-melons as the area's primary export, and for a brief moment, there was a booming surge that pushed the population to an estimated five hundred in 1927. As with most towns along Route 66 in the eastern half of the Texas Panhandle, the downward slide of Alanreed was a slow one.
In 1947, the population had slipped to three hundred people, and there were eleven businesses, mostly service related, along Route 66. Thirty years later, there were an estimated sixty residents and no operating businesses.
Maintained by the Texas Historic Route 66 Association, the restored Bradley Kiser 66 Super Service Station, circa 1930, is the crown jewel of Alanreed.
The reawakening interest in Route 66 has kept the faintest spark of life glowing, however. Perhaps the most notable manifestation of this is the preservation of the 66 Super Service Station, dating to circa 1930.
Less than a dozen miles west of Alanreed are the forlorn remnants of Jericho, a small community with origins dating to 1902 and the establishment of a station for the Chicago, Rock Island & Gulf Railway. Ironically, traffic on Route 66 made the dark days of the Great Depression the glory days for Jericho.
At its peak during the early 1930s, the town boasted three stores, a grain elevator, a tourist court, a garage, and a filling station. But the realignment of the highway and the changing face of agriculture in the Panhandle fueled the town's demise. By 1955, the population no longer was sufficient to warrant a post office.
The original alignment of Route 66 from Jericho to Groom is notorious in the annals of the highway's history. This section, known as the Jericho Gap, was infamous for mud, ruts, and enterprising farmers ready to rescue motorists for a few dollars. The Texas Department of Transportation began work to close the gap with a paved bypass in 1928, and the project was completed in 1931.
Groom, forty-two miles east of Amarillo, appears to be another ghost along Route 66, with its empty auto courts and service stations, but in actuality the town has maintained a rather steady population: 800 in 1972 and 587 in 2000. Conway has a similar appearance, but its population has dropped from a high of 175 in 1969 to less than 20 today.
Alfred Rowe
ALFRED ROWE, founder of McLean and master of the RO Ranch, lived a life of amazingly diverse adventures. Born in Lima, Peru, and educated in England, he immigrated to the United States in 1878 after years spent in worldwide exploration.
Even though his secondary education centered on agricultural studies, Rowe chose to learn the art of American ranching in the Texas Panhandle from the ground up. A year after literally learning the ropes from legendary pioneer rancher Charles Goodnight, Rowe began purchasing trail herds, as well as complete outfits. He started his own ranch using an abandoned dugout as headquarters and drove his herds to Dodge City in Kansas.
By 1895, the RO Ranch encompassed more than two hundred thousand acres of owned and leased lands, and Rowe was one of the most successful ranchers on the Panhandle plains. This success fueled other endeavors on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and soon he was traveling, often with his family, to England at least twice a year.
With the establishment of rail lines to the north and south of the ranch, Rowe diversified his business enterprises and began selling small farms. Tying this and his ranching together was his donation of land, in 1902, for a cattle-loading facility on the Rock Island Railroad and the platting of an accompanying town site.
Rowe's star was still rising when, in 1912 on a return trip from England, he tragically became a victim of the sinking of the H.M.S.
Titanic.
The winds play a haunting melody in Jericho as they whisper through glassless windows and swirl dust on floors.
Amid the ruins of Jericho, the rusty bones of what was once the pride of Detroit provide a link to the modern era.
T
HE
S
TAKED
P
LAINS
I
N HIS SEMINAL WORK
published in 1946,
A Guide Book to Highway 66
, author Jack Rittenhouse says about the road west of Amarillo: “Now you are on the âSTAKED PLAINS,' or âLlano Estacdo' as the Spaniards called it. The origin of the name is disputed, but it is generally taken to be derived from the legend that early pioneers drove stakes along their trails for lack of natural landmarks to guide them.”
Vestiges of the Route 66 glory days and the frontier era in which they were founded pepper the communities in the western half of the Panhandle, but few qualify as ghost towns. The exceptions are Boise (less than a site on an early alignment of the highway that is on private property), Wildorado, and Glenrio.
Depending on the date of the map you consult, Glenrio may be shown in New Mexico or Texas, but it is actually in the latter astride the border in northwestern Deaf Smith County. At least most of the town is in Texas; Jack Rittenhouse notes that, in 1946, the depot was on the west side of the state line, and the business district was on the east.
Some twenty years before the road through town was marked with a shield emblazoned with two sixes, Glenrio was a farming town on the Chicago, Rock Island & Gulf Railway. The depot and railyard were beehives of activity. Cattle and produce were loaded on outbound shipments, while freight and dry goods for the area's farms and ranches came inbound.
A vintage Jeep out to pasture seems an apt monument to the landscape of the Staked Plains that embraces the ghostly remnants of Glenrio.
Glenrio is accessed from exit 0 on Interstate 40.
A station in Glenrio stands in silent testimony to an era when traffic flowed through town day and night without respite.
By the 1920s, the little town on the staked plains was a quiet but busy community with a hotel, a land office, a hardware store, a grocery store, and several cafés and service stations. It even had a newspaper, the
Glenrio Tribune
.
What it did not have were bars or liquor stores, since Deaf Smith County was dry. This posed no real hardship on residents, though, since libations were but a dusty five-mile drive to the west in Endee, New Mexico.
With the closure of the depot in 1955, the asphalt life-line that was Route 66 became the town's primary source of revenue. Upon completion of Interstate 40 in 1973 and the severance of this tenuous hold, Glenrio quickly succumbed to abandonment.
Today, Glenrio is a photographer's paradise, with its forlorn ruins casting long shadows over the empty asphalt of the old highway. Among the favored photo ops are the empty remnants of the Texas Longhorn Motel and Café, once promoted with a sign that read “First Stop in Texas” on one side and “Last Stop in Texas” on the other.
The Longhorn story begins with the opening of the State Line Bar on the New Mexico side of the state line in 1934 by Homer and Margaret Ehresman. As an interesting historic curiosity, Margaret ran the post office from this location, and an early photo shows this building with “Post Office Glenrio N.M.” over the door.
In 1946, rumors of a pending realignment led the Ehresmans to relocate their business five miles west to Endee, New Mexico. In 1950, they returned and opened the Longhorn.