The old saw has it that the prairie grasses once “swept the stirrups” of pre-settlement Hamilton Countians. The story is, that in those days, the rocky-brushy lands occupied only the tops of hills and outcrops, while slopes and bottoms were covered by feet of soil, which were in turn thickly covered by tall grasses and scattered post and live oak. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a change. First, barbed wire introduced confined grazing with overstocking common. This coincided with a drought in 1886 in which no rain was recorded in Hamilton proper. The second was a cotton bonanza in which even severely erodible lands were cultivated. Finally, the drought and Dust Bowl, which afflicted much of the southern Great Plains, had its impact here. My father was a teenage farm hand in Dust Bowl days on a farm near Ireland. His recollection of the countryside of that era was “what was not plowed up and blowing away had been grazed to the roots.” Now this is not an indictment of our ancestors. Mine were among those who broke the land and grazed the remainder hard, though I have no doubt that other old timers treated the land gently. But clearly, early land management practices radically changed the face of Hamilton County. Soil loss was enormous.
Telling the stories of our people and our time
