Location shown is the county courthouse
The Person
"ROBERTS, ORAN MILO (1815-1898). Oran M. Roberts, jurist and governor of Texas, son of Obe and Margaret (Ewing) Roberts, was born in Laurens District, South Carolina, on July 9, 1815. He was educated at home until he was seventeen, then entered the University of Alabama in 1832, graduated four years later, and was admitted to the bar in 1837. After serving a term in the Alabama legislature, where he was an admirer of John C. Calhoun, he moved in 1841 to San Augustine, Texas, where he opened a successful law practice. Roberts was appointed a district attorney by President Sam Houston in 1844. Two years later, after Texas had become a state, he was appointed district judge by Governor James Pinckney Henderson. In addition to his duties on the bench, he also served as president of the board and lecturer in law for the University of San Augustine, where he showed marked talent as a teacher. In 1856 Roberts ran for and won a position on the Texas Supreme Court, where he joined his friend Royal T. Wheeler, the chief justice. During this time Roberts became a spokesman for states' rights, and when the secessionist crisis appeared in 1860, he was at the center of the pro-Confederate faction. In January 1861 he was unanimously elected president of the Secession Convention in Austin, a meeting that he had been influential in calling. Along with East Texas colleagues George W. Chilton and John S. Ford, Roberts led the passage of the ordinance removing Texas from the Union in 1861. In 1862 he returned to East Texas, where he helped raise a regiment, the Eleventh Texas Infantry of Walker's Texas Division. His military career was brief. After seeing very little combat and after an unsuccessful attempt to gain a brigadiership, Roberts returned to Austin as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court in 1864. He held this position until he was removed along with other state incumbents in 1865. During Reconstructionqv he was elected a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1866 and also, along with David G. Burnet, was elected United States senator. As Roberts had anticipated, the new majority of Radical Republicans in Congress refused to seat the entire Texas delegation along with the delegations of other southern states. After his rejection, about which he later wrote an article entitled "The Experience of an Unrecognized Senator," published in the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Associationin 1908. Roberts eventually returned to Gilmer, Texas, where he opened a law school in 1868. Among his students were a future Texas Supreme Court justice, Sawnie Robertson, and a Dallas district judge, George N. Aldredge. With the return of the Democrats to power in Austin in 1874, Roberts was first appointed, then elected, to the Texas Supreme Court. He served as chief justice for four years and was involved in rewriting much of Texas civil law. In 1878 he was elected governor of Texas on a platform of post-Reconstruction fiscal reform. His two gubernatorial terms were marked by a reduction in state expenditures. His plan for countering the high taxes and state debt of the Reconstruction years became known as "pay as you go." A major part of this plan involved the sale of public lands to finance the debt and to fund public schools. Though ultimately successful in both reducing the debt and increasing the public school fund, the decreased government appropriations under Roberts halted public school growth for a time. Also, his land policy tended to favor large ranchers and companies in the development of West Texas. Nonetheless he remained popular with rural landowners, largely because he lowered taxes, as well as with land speculators. The present Capitol in Austin was contracted during Roberts's terms, and the cornerstone for the University of Texas was laid in 1882. Railroad mileage increased across West Texas, and the frontier became more secure. In 1883, shortly before Roberts's term as governor ended, the University of Texas opened in Austin. Upon his retirement Roberts was immediately appointed professor of law, a position he held for the next ten years. During this period he was immensely influential in the state's legal profession. His impact on a generation of young attorneys was symbolized by the affectionate title "Old Alcalde" bestowed on him by his students. During his tenure at the university, Roberts wrote several professional works, among them a text, The Elements of Texas Pleading (1890), which was used for decades after his retirement from teaching. In 1893 he left the university and moved to Marble Falls, where he turned his attention to more general historical writings. His essay "The Political, Legislative, and Judicial History of Texas for its Fifty Years of Statehood, 1845-1895" was published in an early general history of the state, Comprehensive History of Texas, 1685 to 1897 (1898), edited by Dudley G. Wooten.qv Roberts's chapters on Texas in volume eleven of C. A. Evans's Confederate Military History (1899) stress the role of the Lone Star State in the Civil War. With his interest in Texas history unabated, Roberts returned to Austin in 1895. Here, along with several other prominent Texans, he participated in forming the Texas State Historical Association.qv He served as the organization's first president and submitted several of the first articles published in its Quarterly. Roberts was married to Francis W. Edwards of Ashville, Alabama, from 1837 until her death in 1883. They were the parents of seven children. In 1887 Roberts married Mrs. Catherine E. Border. He died at his home in Austin on May 19, 1898, and was buried in the State Cemetery." ~ Angel Fire
The Place
"ROBERTS COUNTY. Roberts County is in the northwestern Panhandle, bounded on the north by Ochiltree County, on the east by Hemphill County, on the south by Gray County, and on the west by Hutchinson County. The center of the county lies at 35° 30' north latitude and 100° 32' west longitude. The county was named for two distinguished Texans with the surname Roberts, John S. Roberts and Oran Milo Roberts.qqv Miami is the county seat. The county is crossed by U.S. Highway 60, State Highway 70, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Roberts County covers 924 square miles of rolling plains with elevations that range from 2,467 to 3,219 feet above sea level. Annual rainfall is 20.7 inches. January's average minimum temperature is 19° F; July's average maximum is 94° F. The county has a growing season of 192 days, the soils are black, sandy loam with clayey subsoils, and between 11 and 20 percent of the land is considered prime farmland. The county is in the Rolling Plains vegetation area, with tall grasses and mesquite and live oak trees and is drained by the Canadian River and its numerous tributaries.
"Prehistoric cultures occupied this region, followed by Plains Apaches. In the early eighteenth century the Apaches were pushed out by the Comanches, who then dominated the area of the Texas Panhandle until the 1870s. The nomadic Comanches hunted the immense herds of buffalo that ranged through the area that would become Roberts County. The actions of Ranald S. Mackenzie and federal troops in the Red River War of 1874–75 removed the Indian threat. At the same time buffalo hunters killed off the great herds of bison. In 1876 Roberts County was carved from Bexar County and the Clay Land District and attached to Wheeler County for judicial purposes. The first settler was Bill Anderson, who arrived the same year. Henry Whiteside Cresswell established the first ranch on Home Ranch Creek in 1877. Cresswell included most of Roberts County in his Cresswell Ranch and ran 45,000 cattle on land spanning several counties. Marion Armstrong opened a stagecoach stand on Red Deer Creek at the site of future Miami in 1879. There were only thirty-two people in the county in 1880, all of them working on cattle ranches. In 1885 Cresswell moved his ranch headquarters north to Ochiltree County.
"In 1887 the Southern Kansas Railway built a line from the Oklahoma border into the Panhandle, passing through Roberts County and linking up with Panhandle City the following year. Settlers followed in the wake of the railroad, and the town of Miami was platted out along the railroad in the southeastern part of the county in the summer of 1887. Settlers around Miami petitioned for county government, while cattlemen and settlers along the Canadian River in the northern part of the county framed a counter petition with Parnell, a small settlement in the northwestern part of the county, as proposed county seat. The county was organized in January of 1889, and Miami was chosen as the county seat, but the election was declared fraudulent in December, and Parnell was chosen county seat instead. Parnell remained the county seat until 1898, after another election relocated the seat of county government back to Miami. By 1890 Roberts County had a population of 326 and thirty-four farms and ranches. Among the important ranches were the Cresswell Ranch, the Turkey Track Ranch, and the Cross Bar Ranch. Miami prospered as the shipping point for cattle. The county population slowly grew to 620 in 1900, 950 in 1910, and a peak of 1,469 in 1920. The county economy centered on cattle raising, and the number of cattle increased from 30,259 in 1900 to a peak of 48,959 in 1930. During the same period the county developed a modest farming economy, increasing from 3,576 improved acres in 1900 to 44,751 in 1930. Wheat was by far the most important crop, increasing from 1,423 acres in 1910 to 29,350 acres in 1920, to a peak of 34,102 acres, over three quarters of the cropland harvested that year, in 1930. Corn, oats, and cotton were also grown at different times. The Dust Bowl and the Great Depressionqqv dealt hard blows to the farming industry of Roberts County, as the number of acres in cultivation declined by a quarter during the 1930s, and the value of county farms dropped by a third. Roberts County's population was relatively static in the 1920s, with 1,457 inhabitants in 1930. Thereafter a long term decline set in, as the county population fell to 1,289 in 1940, 1,031 in 1950, and 967 in 1970 and then recovered slightly to 1,025 in 1990; there were 887 people living in the county in 2000. Throughout its history Roberts County has remained one of the most sparsely populated counties in the state. Most of the inhabitants of the county have been white of English, Irish, and German descent; in 2000 blacks comprised 0.34 percent of the county's residents and Hispanics made up less than 4 percent of the population.
"Agribusiness and oilfield operations came to dominate the county's economy. Oil was discovered in Roberts County in 1945, and 40,126,321 barrels had been produced through 1990. Almost 412,600 barrels of oil and 23,574,562 cubic feet of gas-well gas were produced in the county in 2000; by the end of that year 44,937,568 barrels of oil had been taken from county lands since 1945. Though the number of acres devoted to wheat production never returned to its 1930 level, wheat remained the dominant crop through the 1990s, while the number of cattle raised in the county remained in excess of 30,000 over the same period. In 1982, 98 percent of the land was in farms and ranches, with 9 percent under cultivation. In 2002 the county had 94 farms and ranches covering 494,588 acres, 89 percent of which were devoted to pasture and 10 percent to crops. In that year farmers and ranchers in the area earned $13,232,000; livestock sales accounted for $11,006,000 of the total. Beef cattle were the area's most important agricultural product, but crops such as corn, wheat, sorghum, and soybeans were also grown in the area.
"Roberts County voters supported Democratic presidential candidates in all elections from 1892 through 1948, with the exception of Al Smith in 1928. They voted Republican in every presidential election from 1952 through 2004. Religious life in the county in the early years revolved around the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches of Miami, all founded in the late 1890s. These denominations were joined by the Church of Christ in 1912 and the Christian Church in 1923. The early settlers of the county also made education a priority, and by 1899 Roberts County had four schools serving 165 pupils. Educational levels have improved dramatically in the county in the second half of the twentieth century. While only 22 percent of the county population had completed high school in 1950, 78 percent were high school graduates in 1980. By 2000, 90 percent had completed high school and more than 25 percent had college degrees. Miami, the county seat and the only incorporated community in the county, had 675 inhabitants in 1990; in 2000 588 people, more than two-thirds of the county's residents, lived there. The annual National Cow Calling Contest has been held in Miami since 1949, and there are a number of scenic drives in the county." ~ Texas State Historical Association Online