Andrew W. Blankenship was raised in a 12-room, two-story house on Alarm Creek (just south of Stephenville) among 14 other children. On December 15, 1895, he married Mary Almor Perritt on Alarm Creek. The marriage took place in a buggy, a popular Texas fashion around the turn of the century. Mary remembered: “I can recall my apprehension about the horses’ behavior, but they were intently still as if listening to the ‘I do’s’ also. In 1900, Stephenville lawyer, James Jarrott, traveled up to Lubbock to visit the Faulkner family that had earlier moved to the area from Stephenville. He found that 100 sections of state land would soon be sold and he decided to buy it and return to Erath County to sell land to anyone who wanted to migrate. The Blankenship family decided to make the move. “During the fall of 1901, we started the job of turning everything outside of bare necessities into cash . . . $500 in cash, $100 of which was credit from the grocery store on our egg money. We took all this in $20 dollar gold pieces, sewed them into a money belt to tie around [Mary’s] waist under my petticoats and full skirt . . . We had our pictures made together and left one with each family of kin ‘just in case’ . . . spent Christmas with the old folks, filled out water kegs, bid all good-bye, and hit the trail the day after Christmas.” The Blankenships and dozens of other families settled on their new land near Lubbock. But the land had been held in common by the the area ranchers who were so angry at the farmers that they harrassed them and hired an assassin to shoot the organizer James Jarrott to death as he approached his windmill and water tank. Some of the settlers returned to Stephenville while the Blankenships and most others defied the ranchers and held on to their land.

Seymour V. Conner,(ed.) The West is for Us: The Reminiscences of Mary Blankenship, Lubbock: West Texas Museum Association, 1958.