DUANE
Duane's take
Now, I'm gonna tell you this one the way the official marker tells it — you be the judge of how wild it sounds on its own. The Brazos River runs eight hundred and forty miles through this state, and it has never once made up its mind about whether it wants to help you or stop you cold. Out here near the source of the Double Mountain Fork, settlers learned that lesson the hard way.
Friend one season, foe the next — that river had a personality, and it was complicated. This stretch of country came alive after the XIT Ranch was sold off to smaller operators, around 1912. The XIT was one of those operations that swallowed the horizon, and once it broke up, homesteaders moved in, drawn by that same river that had been watering this land for longer than anyone could count.
The river attracted them. Pulled them right in. And then, as rivers tend to do, it turned on them when the rains came.
Wet weather would roll through, the Double Mountain Fork would do what rivers do, and suddenly the road across that valley became something closer to a suggestion than a path. You weren't crossing anything. You were waiting.
And settlers in 1926 had had about enough of waiting. So here's what they did. They didn't petition anybody.
They didn't write letters. They built a gyp-rock road across the valley themselves — and then they went a step further and lined the actual river bed with rock so that when the water came up, you could still get your wagon, your truck, your boots across. Rocky Ford.
They made the crossing passable by the sheer stubbornness of their own hands. And while they were at it — because apparently one community project wasn't enough — they built a tabernacle. A place for church, for elections, for whatever gathering needed a roof and four walls out here on the plain.
New roads have come since then. Roads that bypass Rocky Ford entirely, sending travelers off in other directions without so much as a glance at what those settlers hauled into place by hand. But here's the thing the marker wants you to know, and it says it plain: the community still thrives.
Eight hundred and forty miles of river, and the people at this crossing wouldn't let it win.
What the marker says
(The ford was 0.5 mile to the west) The 840-mile Brazos River was both friend and foe to settlers. Here near the source of Double Mountain Fork, after XIT Ranch was sold to smaller operators about 1912, the river that had attracted settlers was found to obstruct wet-weather travel. In 1926, the settlers built a gyp-rock road across the valley and lined the river bed with rock, to make a passable road. They also built a tabernacle for church, elections, and other gatherings. New roads bypass Rocky Ford, yet the community still thrives. (1976)