Abernathy, Texas

Abernathy exists because the Santa Fe Railroad needed a stop between Plainview and Lubbock. The line went in in nineteen oh nine, the town was platted on July eighth of that year, and promoters from the South Plains Investment Company moved entire buildings from the predecessor settlement at Bartonsite, a two-story yellow hotel, a lumberyard, a blacksmith shop, several houses, to stock the new community. The town incorporated in nineteen twenty-four and by nineteen twenty-six had forty-five businesses and about fifteen hundred residents, calling itself a cotton and grain center. Abernathy sits on the Hale-Lubbock county line, a compact South Plains rail town whose story tracks the transformation of the Llano Estacado from open range to cotton field in a single generation.