Bledsoe
Cochran County, Texas
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Bledsoe
The area of present-day Bledsoe was originally purchased in 1902 by Lafeyette Hardy and his wife who homesteaded the land. Mrs. Hardy died in 1904, but Mr. Hardy fulfilled the three year residency requirement and obtained titled to the land. In 1906 Hardy sold the land to Joab Alexander who built a house and drilled a well, which would later serve as the town of Bledsoe's water supply. Alexander ranched the land until his
death in 1924. The ranch house hand burned, leaving only the bunkhouse, and his hiers sold the land to Nelson W. Willard, of Illinois.
Willard platted a section of his Cochran County land, dividing it into blocks, lots, streets and alleys. The townsite was named after Samuel T. Bledsoe, president of the Panhandle and Santa Fe Railway. The Alexander
bunkhouse served as residence for the Garland McCoy family at that time. Garland McCoy was the agent responsible for selling the lots of the proposed town.
The first residents of Bledsoe were R. C. Strickland, his wife Elsie and their two children, Gladys, aged 4, and Raymond, 6 months old, who arrived in September 1925. At that time, the Stricklands and the McCoys were the only inhabitants of that area of Cochran County.
The afternoon the Stricklands arrived in Bledsoe was windy and sandy. They unloaded their cooking equipment, built a campfire and stretched a canvas from the side of their Model T truck to the ground to make a lean-to as shelter until their house was built.
Other families followed quickly and lived in tents and lean-tos while their houses were being built. It was not uncommon to see three or four boxcar shacks appear in a single day.
One of the first businesses built in Bledsoe was the printing firm that printed the county's first newspaper, The Cochran County News. A school was built through donated labor and opened in November with Corine Lackey as the teacher. A community church, which later became the Methodist Church, was also built through donated labor.
During the first year mail for Bledsoe residents was delivered to Lehman, where it was collected and brought to the grocery store in Bledsoe to be distributed. The post office was officially established on April 8, 1926 with James Lackey as Postmaster. Lackey had served as the fireman on the locomotive that laid the railroad tracks into Cochran County.
The first regularly scheduled train ran from Lubbock to Bledsoe on December 1, 1925 and was cause for much excitement in the county. Frank Lehman and Samuel Bledsoe, railroad officials, rode the first train into Cochran County and people gathered in Lehman to meet the first train, eager to wave at the officials. Bledsoe acknowledged the crowds and waved at them; Lehman never looked up from his newspaper. The railway failed to install enough ballast, especially through the sandy fields west of Lehman and the rails would shift up and down every time a train would pass over them.
Once the tracks and loading pens were completed, ranchers in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico began shipping cattle and sheep. 12,000 sheep were brought to Bledsoe to be shipped and were kept in pens throughout the town. Often the pens were not large enough to hold the herds and the overflow were held on the open range with the owner’s hiring extra local cowboys, young and old, for this purpose.
July 12-13, 1926 the town of Bledsoe threw a huge celebration to commemorate its first anniversary and the success of the railroad. Special trains ran from Lubbock to Bledsoe and local ranchers donated beeves for a community barbecue for the hundreds who had gathered for the celebration. There were speeches, horse races, ball games, concession stands, pink soda-pop and several dances. Musical entertainment was provided by local guitar pickers, fiddlers, and a piano.
During the late 1920’s, Bledsoe was one of the Southwest’s largest cattle shipping stations and the largest on the Santa Fe line. Bledsoe was also the largest town in Cochran County at that time, boasting a population of 750, over twice that of Morton. The population begain to decline by 1930.
By the late 1920's Bledsoe was home to three lumber stores, a two-story, thirty-two room hotel, two drug stores, two grocery stores, a barber shop, ice plant and electric plant. Before the electric plant was built,
the Pruitt family owned a wind-charged generator and they also owned the only radio in town and every Saturday night the neighbors would gather at the Pruitt residence to listen to the Grand Ole Opry.
An increase in population meant more water was needed, so the community all chipped in to purchase a gasoline engine to pump water on days when the wind wasn’t blowing. Several residents drilled their own wells and installed windmills.
A park was built around the public windmill and fenced to keep the various animals that roamed the town out. The park quickly became a community gathering spot for visiting, playing games, ice cream suppers, the annual corn-boiling picnic (everyone in the community would bring corn from their garden to boil in wash pots and it was eaten by all with freshly churned butter).
Around 1934/35 live entertainment was often provided in the evenings by the Carter family, who would play and sing from the front porch of the hotel where they lived. The Carters were eventually offered a job signing at Lubbock radio station as the Carter Trio and eventually the Carter Quartet. They eventually moved to Ft. Worth where they became the famous Chuck Wagon Gang.
The first death in Bledsoe was that of Frederick Gogardo, who died in December 1925 of pneumonia.
C. Tobe Story, a Bledsoe resident, was the first person from Cochran County to be sent to the penitentiary after he was caught hauling liquor from Bledsoe to Lehman. After serving a year and one day, he returned to Bledsoe where he worked as a well driller until he was murdered by drifter over a poker game in 1943.
The Cochran County Historical Survey Committee placed a historical marker at Bledsoe in 1965, it was stolen in 1976 and never found.
The depot at Bledsoe was closed in 1964 and moved to Lubbock. By this time, shipping livestock by rail was a thing a thing from the past, and the train only journeyed from Lubbock to Bledsoe when there was grain to ship from the grain elevator or oil from the new oil field and the livestock pens were torn down.
The railway from Whiteface to Bledsoe was abandoned in 1984 and the rails and ties were pulled up for salvage. By 1990 only four businesses remained in Bledsoe. As of March 2021, there are no businesses operating in Bledsoe.
If you know of a town or community in Cochran County that is not listed here, or if you have photos, maps, documents or stories you would like to share, please, email me!