Caprock Chronicles: Remembering County Line

Caprock Chronicles is edited by Jack Becker, Librarian Emeritus of Texas Tech University. He can be reached at jack.becker@ttu.edu. Today’s article about the community or County Line is by Lubbock County Historical Commission member Cameron L. Saffell, Curator of History at the Museum of Texas Tech University.

Through most of the twentieth century a small, active community existed in northwest Lubbock County centered at the intersection of FM 179 and FM 597. It was called County Line because the Hale County line crosses through the north side of the community.County Line developed around a school, which also doubled as the community center and on Sundays as a church. The first farm families arrived in the area around 1901, and by 1903 they built the first school using lumber hauled in from Canyon City, then the nearest railhead. A brick school was built in 1926.In 1905 the first recorded death occurred, that of Hardy Tamadge Dewitt, the 5-month old grandson of pioneer farmer J. G. Hardy of the Hardy community a few miles to the south. The closest cemeteries were over twenty miles away, so Dewitt was buried near the County Line school/church—starting Lubbock County’s third oldest cemetery.

The following year J. W. Murray donated a five-acre tract to Lubbock County that included Dewitt’s grave as grounds for “a church, a school, and a seminary”—an apparent mistake where he meant to say cemetery.The school, the cemetery, and the community had several names over its first two decades—Murray, Pettit, Huff, Harral—all referring to prominent local residents. The cemetery was not consistently referred to as County Line Cemetery until 1923, and it was 1925 before the County School Board minutes quit referring to the school regularly asPettit School—despite the fact that residents had formally organized as the Harral County Line Common School District in 1918.

From 1925 to 1935 the district was classified as a seven-year elementary school with three years of high school. In 1927 the school reported having 160 students and was so overwhelmed that it hired an additional teacher. In 1932 the school was large enough to include a 4-H Club and school orchestra.On Sundays several groups used the school as their church. A Baptist congregation met for worship as early as 1902, with small Methodist and Church of Christ congregations meeting from the late 1910s into the 1930s.The County Line Community Club organized in 1924, marked the first of a number of social groups to organize in the County Line area. These eventually included the Murray Demonstration Club, the Sew-A-While Club, the County Line Quilting Club, and by the 1970s, a County Line Bowling Club and a County Line Canasta Club.

The issue of rural school consolidation caused great consternation in 1935, when the Lubbock County Board of Education voted to consolidate County Line and Hardy schools with Shallowater. Residents of the County Line Independent School District sued to stop the consolidation, citing that Lubbock County could not force the Hale County residents of the school district to involuntarily consolidate with Shallowater.

Their winning lawsuit set a significant legal precedent that has been cited in numerous Texas cases as recently as 2017.With the ability to control their children’s destiny, County Line residents voted toconsolidate with Abernathy ISD—another “county line” district with students residing inboth Lubbock and Hale counties. For the next five years Abernathy maintained the CountyLine school as an elementary campus before finally closing it in 1940.The school closing forced the religious congregations to move.

The Methodist and Church of Christ groups decided to consolidate with their brethren churches in Abernathy,while the Baptists decided to build a new church building just north of the demolished school. The County Line Baptist Church continues to worship in that building today—one of the only remaining structures in County Line.Even after the school consolidation, County Line survived as the home of three grocery stores, two blacksmith shops, two garages, and two cotton gins. Residents arranged for the establishment of county-supported clubhouse in 1974 to help maintain asense of community, but the last store closed in 1986 and both cotton gins closed by 2000.The community hosted two reunions in 1977 and 1983.

The latter, inspired in part by the preservation and erection of a historical marker for the Carlisle Cemetery, leadingresidents to clean up and better mark the graves of the County Line Cemetery. Scrapbooks compiled for the 1983 reunion document much of the community’s history. The rediscovery of the scrapbooks led the Lubbock County Historical Commission to finish the work the residents started more than thirty years before. In 2018 the TexasHistorical Commission designated the County Line Cemetery as a Historic Texas Cemetery, and in 2022 an Official Texas Historical Marker was installed to mark the existence of this once vibrant rural community. Today, only the cemetery, the Baptist church, and some run-down buildings remain as physical evidence, surrounded by agricultural fields and oilpump jacks

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Caprock Chronicles: Remembering County Line between Hale and Lubbock