Sand Hills Section House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Ward County, in the middle of the Permian Basin, there's a little building with a big job in its past. The Sand Hills Section House.

Built in 1903 by the Texas and Pacific Railway, and if you know anything about that stretch of West Texas, you already understand why something like this mattered. See, the Texas and Pacific didn't just lay track and wish everybody luck. They stationed track foremen out along the road, one every twenty miles, and they built each of those foremen a section house to live and work from.

Twenty miles. Think about that spacing for a moment. That's a lot of lonesome country between one man and the next.

Now, out here in the Permian Basin, the land has a way of making its feelings known. Sand bogs down anything that moves through it. Storms roll in and strand a man before he even knows what's happening.

And when that occurred, when some poor soul found himself sand-bogged or caught out in a storm with nowhere to turn, these section houses were the answer. Water. Human aid.

That's what the marker says, and sometimes those two things are exactly the whole world. Water and another person willing to help. The Texas and Pacific built this place in 1903, and it stood out there in the sand hills doing quiet, essential work.

Not glamorous. Not the stuff of legends, maybe. But the kind of thing that kept men alive when the Basin decided it wasn't through with them yet.

What the marker says

Built 1903 by Texas & Pacific Rwy., for one of its track foremen who were stationed every 20 miles along road. Section houses in Permian Basin had water and human aid for men sand-bogged or stranded in storms. (Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1965.)