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Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains and West » North Central Texas » Archer City to Quanah » Vernon (Wilbarger County) » W. T. Waggoner Estate Building

W. T. Waggoner Estate Building

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1951, Wilson, Patterson and Associates. 1700 Deaf Smith St.

Replacing ranch offices in the More Tire Co. Building (AQ29), this building was constructed to house the trust established by W. T. Waggoner to operate his ranch. The low, sweeping lines of the two-story, limestone-clad headquarters of one of Texas’s great ranching empires is like the plains that fed its herds: wide and flat. The first story has a red granite portal and a continuous band of windows with slender stone frames. The second floor steps back, with a similar window strip, and further emphasizing horizontality, the flat roof leaves a hard, straight line against the sky.

The Waggoner (Three D) Ranch (now known as the W. T. Waggoner Estate Ranch), family-owned since 1849, extends east of Vernon to Electra and south to Seymour, with its headquarters in Vernon. The 535,000-acre ranch is the largest in Texas “under one fence” (the King Ranch is larger but divided into several parcels). With a world-wide marketing effort, the ranch was sold intact in 2016 after many years of dissent among the heirs, who attempted to break up the ranch.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Robert L. More Tire Company
Wilbarger County Courthouse and Courthouse Square

Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "W. T. Waggoner Estate Building", [Vernon, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-02-AQ30.

Print Source

Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019, 325-325.

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