JA Milk and Meat House

The JA is among the best-known ranches in Texas and perhaps the entire country. Well-run through more than 100 years, its good management, plus the cast of players who owned and operated the ranch, have propelled the JA into a prominent place in history. The people behind the formation of the JA Ranch were Charles Goodnight, John Adair and Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie Adair—an unlikely partnership, or so many thought.

Goodnight was a hard-talking rancher, having been a scout for the Texas Rangers, a frontiersman and a trailblazer. He and his wife, Mary Ann, lived on their ranch near Pueblo, Colorado. John Adair was an Irish investment broker, frugal, polished and well educated. Cornelia Ritchie was the daughter of a wealthy New Yorker. She had been left as a young widow in 1864, when her husband and the father of their son, John Ritchie, died.

She remarried in 1869 to John Adair, who owned investment brokerage companies in Ireland and New York. The couple traveled between Great Britain and the United States each year. During the 1870s, it was considered fashionable to make expeditions into the “Wild West” to shoot buffalo and other game. It was on one of those trips in 1874 that the Adairs fell in love with the American West. John set up another brokerage house in Denver in 1875.

Goodnight, at this same time, was driving his herd to Texas in search of good grass and watering sources he had heard existed in the Texas Panhandle. He wintered along the way in New Mexico in late 1875. With the aid of an old Comanchero who knew the area, Goodnight settled his herd in Palo Duro Canyon in the fall of 1876. He established a camp and went back to Colorado, meeting the Adairs there in 1877. John Adair’s sources had suggested Goodnight as the best man to run a ranch for them as an investment project. The men decided to visit the Palo Duro and discuss a possible ranch partnership.

The men, their wives, two cowboys and other necessary hands started out on their trip from Pueblo to Palo Duro. The group arrived in the canyon in May 1877 and stayed in the two-room log house Goodnight had erected earlier.

On June 18, 1877, a partnership was struck specifying that for five years Adair would provide Goodnight a salary and pay all ranch expenses. Goodnight was to manage the ranch and develop the herd. At the end of the five years in 1882, Goodnight would pay back Adair’s investment plus interest and split the ranch so Adair would have two-thirds of it plus cattle and profits. Goodnight would get one-third. They settled on John Adair’s initials for the brand.

Goodnight had dugouts made for his cowboys and the cook. Also built under his direction were a blacksmith shop, tinner’s shop, water tanks, roads and a big bunkhouse/mess house. Barns and corrals were constructed, and eventually a big rock house was built, primarily for occupation by the Adairs. On one end of the house was the log house Goodnight had constructed years earlier. The milk and meat house was built around 1880 while Goodnight was manager of the ranch.

The JA Milk and Meat House, now at the NRHC, represents an era when such structures provided an easier way to preserve food, particularly for the large ranches. Typically, these structures had a meat storage/workroom fitted with huge hooks fastened to the rafters. From the hooks hung beef, elk, venison, buffalo, sheep and pork. The carcasses were covered with cloth or canvas sacks. On the JA, 50 people were fed daily, so the supply of fresh meat was always being replenished. Slatted walls on the meat room allowed air circulation, yet were spaced closed enough to keep out predators. Lard was stored in large metal cans, and bacon was kept between layers of salt in wooden boxes.

The milk room was designed with thick walls, a double-glazed window and water trough. Water flowed from a spring or windmill into the trough where crocks filled with dairy products, eggs and other perishable foods were placed in the water. Wet cloths covered the crockery, and evaporation in the dark room aided the cooling process.

The JA Milk and Meat House from the Palo Duro Canyon demonstrates a simple but clever method for keeping perishable food fresh and represents all spring houses erected in the developing West.