Clarendon, Texas

Texas

Cowboys called this town Saints Roost, because a Methodist preacher built it to be dry.

historicaldisaster

Cowboys called this town Saints Roost. The name was not a compliment. A Methodist clergyman named L. H. Carhart founded the place in 1878, and he wanted a sobriety settlement. Not a boomtown with a saloon on every corner, which was the usual arrangement out here. Something quieter. The cowboys riding through noticed, and the nickname stuck. It stuck so hard that the town museum is still called the Saints' Roost Museum. Clarendon was one of only three original settlements in the Texas Panhandle. The other two were Mobeetie and Tascosa. Then the Fort Worth and Denver Railway laid its track and missed the town entirely. So the town moved to the railway. Today about nineteen hundred people live here, sixty miles east of Amarillo.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 1 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
Clarendon acquired the sobriquet "Saints Roost" from local cowboys, hence the unusual name of the Clarendon museum, the Saints' Roost Museum.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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