Waggoner Colony 56,000 Acres. Wichita and Wilbargers Counties, Texas - 1908

Electra, Tx: R.S. Allen, 1908. Good plus.. Letter sheet, 11 x 8.5 inches. Previously folded, with one short separation along old fold from edge. Small portion of one corner with minor loss, repaired with tissue and not affecting text. Contemporary manuscript pencil notes. Light toning and dust soiling. Scarce promotional and pictorial letter sheet that promotes land in the Waggoner Colony, a large section of the Waggoner Ranch between the town of Electra and the Red River that was sold off during the early 1900s. "The Waggoner (Three D) Ranch had its beginnings in the early 1850s when Daniel Waggoner and a fifteen-year-old black slave trailed 242 longhorn cattle and six horses into Wise County.... Between 1889 and 1903 the ranch came to cover a block running thirty miles east and west and twenty-five miles north and south, including more than a million acres. It extended into Foard, Knox, Baylor, and Archer counties but centered chiefly in Wilbarger and Wichita counties.... In 1903 the China Creek headquarters was sold as farming land in a development known as the Waggoner Colony" -- TSHA Online.

One side of the sheet is taken up by a map of the Waggoner Colony, broken up into its constituent parcels, with a the Red River running across the top of the sheet. The reverse has the letterhead of Reece S. Allen who became the land agent for the property and "successor to Waggoner Colony" later in the decade. The writing space on this side of the sheet has been used for an incomplete, anonymous diary entry dated April 21, 1908, that discusses the land sales and related ranch business. Oil was discovered around Electra in 1911, assuredly pleasing many Waggoner Colony investors. Almost all 19th- and early 20th-century Texas lettersheets are quite scarce; we locate two examples of the present work, at Yale and SMU.