Seagraves still carries cattle, railroad, and oil history

Seagraves sits up in the north end of Gaines County, where U.S. 62/385 crosses State Highway 83. It began as cattle country: the J. C. Sartin family came in 1905 with close to 800 head, and the little settlement around the post office was first called Blythe. When the Spearman Land Company, the Santa Fe Railroad's land arm, started promoting the townsite between 1916 and 1918, it needed a name that wasn't already on a California depot, so in 1918 the town took the name of Santa Fe official C. L. Seagraves.

The railroad is the whole reason there's a town here. A 1917 extension toward Lubbock turned Seagraves into a cattle-shipping point, the place ranchers drove their stock to load. Then oil came in the mid-1930s and the population jumped from about 500 in 1930 to over 3,200 by 1940 — hence the old slogan, 'The City That Oil Built.'

That layered past is why Seagraves reads differently from Seminole down south. You can still pick up the thread at the Seagraves-Loop Museum and Art Center at 201 Main Street, open weekdays nine to five (closed noon to one), where the cattle, rail, and oil chapters of this corner of the county are kept in one place.