Lampasas: Birthplace of the Farmers Alliance

Lampasas, the county seat of Lampasas County since eighteen fifty-six, sits where the Hill Country meets the Edwards Plateau, fed by mineral springs that made it a brief health resort in the eighteen eighties. But its more lasting claim is political. In the late eighteen seventies, as falling crop prices and high costs squeezed small farmers, Lampasas County farmers organized what became the first Farmers Alliance in the nation. That local meeting of beleaguered ranchers and growers grew into the Southern Farmers Alliance, which spread to millions of members across the South and Midwest and provided the organizing backbone for the Populist Party of the eighteen nineties, one of the most significant third-party movements in American history.