DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker reads it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Some brands carry more history than the iron that burned them, and the CV brand is one of those. It starts in 1850, all the way over in McLennan County, where a man named Claiborne Varner registered those two letters for the first time.
Two initials, one brand, and what would turn out to be the better part of a century's worth of Texas story pressed right into the hide of it. Six years later, in 1856, Varner's brother-in-law J. Wes Sheek and Sheek's stepbrother, a young man named Charles Goodnight, took that CV herd and pointed it west.
Now if the name Goodnight sounds familiar to you out here on the Texas plains, well, you just sit with that a moment. The marker doesn't editorialize, and neither will I. What it does say is that Sheek bought Goodnight's portion of the herd in 1869, and in time he moved those cattle further west still, up into Cottle County.
By the 1880s the CV Ranch was established in the northwest corner of Cottle County: forty-seven thousand acres of it. That's not a ranch, friend, that's a county inside a county. The operation grew under various owners until 1889, when a man named Colonel W.
E. Hughes, owner of the Mill Iron ranch, purchased the CV. The ranch house stood sixty-five yards west of right where you're standin'.
Hughes ran the CV until his death in 1918, and that's when things took a turn that nobody on a cattle outfit ever quite plans for. His granddaughter, Annie C. S.
Hughes, inherited the responsibility, and what she did with it reshaped this entire corner of Cottle County. She took thirty-seven thousand acres of the old ranch, divided it into smaller farms, and sold them off between 1927 and 1928. Out of that sale, a community grew up right here, and they named it Cee Vee, spelling out those two old brand letters like they deserved to be said slowly.
At its peak, Cee Vee had four stores, a blacksmith, a barber shop, cafes, four churches, and a cotton gin. The Cee Vee Mercantile store stood on this very site. A post office was granted on the Fourth of July, 1928; independence day for a new little town, you might say, though the marker doesn't say that, so take it as atmosphere.
A school went up in 1929, and by 1935 about a hundred families had settled in here, building lives out of what had once been open ranch land. But then the marker gets quiet, the way Texas markers do when the hard part comes. Drought arrived.
The Depression arrived. Then World War II. And one by one, families left.
By the 1990s, about twenty families remained where a hundred had once put down roots. The CV brand was first scratched into the record in 1850. A hundred and some-odd years later, the community it eventually gave its name to was still holding on, smaller, yes, but still here.
In Texas, sometimes that's the whole story.
What the marker says
The CV cattle brand was first registered in 1850 in McLennan County by Claiborne Varner. In 1856 his brother in law, J. Wes Sheek, and Sheek's stepbrother Charles Goodnight took the CV herd westward. Sheek bought Goodnight's portion of the herd in 1869, and later moved the cattle to Cottle County. The CV Ranch was established in the northwest corner of Cottle County in the 1880s and originally contained 47,000 acres. The ranch became a large operation under various owners. By 1889 the CV Ranch was purchased by Mill Iron ranch owner Col. W. E. Hughes. The ranch house was located 65 yards west. Following Hughes' death in 1918, his granddaughter Annie C. S. Hughes divided 37,000 acres of the ranch into smaller farms and sold them in 1927-28. The community of Cee Vee developed here and contained four stores, a blacksmith, barber shop, cafes, four churches, and a cotton gin. Cee Vee Mercantile store was located on this site. A post office was granted July 4, 1928. A school was built in 1929. By 1935 about 100 families had settled in Cee Vee. However, drought, the depression, and World War II caused many people to leave the area. By the 1990s about 20 families remained. (1996)