E.E. Davis, a bitter critic of the socially and environmentally extractive cotton culture of West-Central Texas wrote that “. . . The pioneers had pioneer habits of thought. They and their forebears lived off the bounty of an untenanted frontier. It is just as natural for them to rob the soil as it was for their fathers to harvest wild chestnuts with no thought whatsoever of the next year’s crop. Fertilization, diversification, and crop rotation meant nothing to them. The calls of the new era reached them too late in life. They constitute a distinct type of our cotton patch poor, soon to pass on and leave the thin lands to less intelligent folk.” By 1910 Erath soil was so depleted by cotton and abusive grazing that half the population had moved away before 1940. This was the period when people with money bought up these small farms for as little as $5.00 an acre and consolidated them into the large ranches that characterize Erath County today.

Edward Everitt Davis, The White Scourge, San Antonio: Naylor, 1940; and Lena Lewis, Erath County: A Compilation, Stephenville, Texas, 1938.