G. W. Smith Home

Duane's take

Now this one comes straight from the official marker, so let me tell it the way it was told to me. You're rolling through Crosby County, and out here the land has a way of making you feel like history is still standin right beside you. Sometimes, it literally is.

There's a house here that's been watchin this country since 1914, and the story of who built it and who it was built for, well, that's the part worth slowin down for. The home belonged to G. W.

Smith. And if that last name rings a bell out here on the South Plains of West Texas, it ought to. G.

W. was the eldest son of Hank Smith, the first settler of the South Plains of West Texas. The first. Now let that sit a moment.

His father had come to country that nobody else had yet claimed as home, and here was his eldest son, puttin down roots in 1914, raisin a house on that same hard, beautiful ground. The house itself was built of shiplap, three rooms on each side of a central hall. Practical, solid, balanced.

The kind of construction that says the man who built it intended to stay. And stay it did. Then comes 1936, and somebody decided that house deserved a little more permanence than wood alone could promise.

They veneered the whole thing in rock, pulled from a nearby canyon. You can almost picture it, the canyon giving up its stone so the old Smith place could wear something tougher than the years. From shiplap to rock, from a settler's son to a landmark.

That house has been standing through West Texas wind and West Texas sun since 1914, dressed in canyon stone since 1936, and still out there in Crosby County telling anybody who passes that the Smiths were here first, and they built things to last.

What the marker says

Built 1914 for eldest son of Hank Smith, the first settler of South Plains of West Texas. Constructed of shiplap with three rooms on each side of hall. Veneered with rock from nearby canyon in 1936. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1967.