Join the LHS for its annual meeting on February 11, 2018 from 2-4 p.m. in the Formby Room, TTU Southwest Collection. The general public is most welcome and light refreshments will be served.

Destination Downtown, the program theme, features Beth Whitley Duke, Executive Director of Center City Amarillo, a Texas Main Street City. Her presentation is titled “The Main Street Way: Celebrating the Past. Building the Future.”

Duke will share the Main Street Program road map that is helping make Amarillo’s historic downtown a destination neighborhood through historic preservation, community events, and public/private partnerships, meeting or exceeding state and national standards for recognition as a Main Street City. For more information, please call 806-392-4949.

Lubbock, the Largest City on the South Plains

In 1890 local citizens founded Lubbock. The town grew slowly at first, but after 1909, when the Santa Fe Railroad arrived, the city expanded, reaching a population of over 4, 000 people in 1920. Continued growth followed, and in 1952, when workers found a 16th century Spanish dagger in the alley behind the Coca-Cola Bottling plant at 16th Street and Texas Avenue, the population stood at 70,000 inhabitants.

Lubbock, with a population of 210,000 in 2009, sits in the heart of a huge agricultural region, the Llano Estacado, a high, flat plateau with rich soils and until recently abundant water supplies. Indeed, the availability of water in part encouraged various Indian peoples to camp in the area around the future site of Lubbock and they in turn helped to determine the routes of Spanish expeditions, including that of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado  in 1541, across the region. Eventually, such important water courses as Yellow House and Blackwater draws led to permanent settlement at Lubbock.

The Federal Building is one of downtown Lubbock's architectural treasures, the beautiful period woodwork of its top-floor courthouse now in danger of destruction from a leaking roof.

Through the years, such settlement brought farmers, businessmen, and townspeople to Lubbock. The people, especially, but in addition agricultural, educational, and medical expansion represent keys to the city's economic growth and to its development as a regional transportation and marketing hub. And, in 2009, a short century after its incorporation, Lubbock remained not only the largest city on the South Plains but also one that could trace its roots through a deep past.

~by Paul Carlson for "Medieval Southwest: Manifestations of the Old World in the New. Texas Tech University, 2009"

A new book about the South Plains Army Airfield by Donald R. Abbe was released on 4/28/14. To purchase the book directly from Arcadia Publishing go here. The book is also available on Amazon.