Ropes Depot and Rail Car House

The railroad depot was an exciting place. With people coming and going and cowhands returning from cattle markets, all sorts of news was brought from other towns to the far-flung settlements in the West. In the depot, all the arrangements were made for cattle movement, package and freight shipment and passenger travel.

Most depots looked similar—even the paint colors were standardized by the railroad company that built them. In some towns, the depot was just one of several buildings comprising a railhead.

The railroad was essential to the growth of ranching: transporting cattle, settlers (some established businesses in the towns), manufactured goods, supplies and lumber to the plains. There is some dispute in the historical record regarding the establishment of the Ropes Depot. In some historical records, the Spade Ranch near present-day Ropesville, seeing the need for rail service to the area, deeded 85 acres to the railway on the condition that a depot, agent’s house and stock pens were built. In other historical references, Mary A. Blankenship, an early settler, said that the railroad and a little yellow depot crossed her family’s south pasture. (The NRHC curators are in the process of researching this history to clarify exactly which land was crossed and which land the depot was built on for a new edition of Across Time & Territory.) Over the years, the depot serviced ranchers from across the South Plains and as far away as New Mexico. In the end, it stood witness to the decline of ranching on the South Plains and the beginning of a farming lifestyle.

The wood-frame Ropes Depot, built on land once owned by Isaac L. Ellwood, a manufacturer of barbed wire, opened on July 1, 1918. Historian Sally Abbe said, “Traditionally, railroads had connected previous settled points. But in the West, railroads were often the forerunners and spurs to civilization. Such was the case with Ropes. The depot was the first business establishment in the town. As more and more farmers and small stockmen moved into the area, the Santa Fe realized the economic value of a town-site at the railroad.”

Work on the line began on Jan. 1, 1917, but was slowed by the needs of World War I. Blankenship described the change.

“The world had now found us,” she wrote. “We watched the lazy prairie take on new life as swarms of men and teams with handscrapers dumped our soil into a railroad dump, followed by the rail-laying crews and the work trains. We experienced a new prosperity right at home as we sold the myriads of workers our vegetables, eggs, home-canned food, milk, butter, meat, and leased to them our teams and our hands.

“Time took on importance,” Blankenship added. “We could set our clock by the noonday train as it stopped to water up at the railroad’s giant overhead tank by its own windmill.”

Abbe wrote that the Ropes Depot lost some of its business after 1924 when the Santa Fe built another depot and railroad line at Anton, Texas, which was also on Spade Ranch land. In the 1930s and ’40s, the depot revived to serve the West Texas farming community. But after World War II, the Santa Fe was forced by escalating costs and declining revenues to limit service. The last Santa Fe passenger train departed on May 1, 1971, Abbe said, and all passenger and dining cars were sold to Amtrak. The depot was closed Oct. 15, 1974, and the Santa Fe offered it for sale. It was purchased by William J. McGinty and eventually donated to the National Ranching Heritage Center by his widow.

Santa Fe officials provided the 1910 blueprints of the Ropes Depot to the NRHC to help with its reconstruction. A long porch that had been added to the structure while it was in Ropesville was replaced by the original station platform. The railroad also donated yellow paint for the depot, red paint for the caboose and waiting room. The railroad added waiting room benches and other authentic period furnishings to its donation. The Spade Ranch provided funds for moving the depot to the NRHC.

The Ropes Depot held an office, receiving area, desk, chairs, ticket window, scale for weighing packages, wood-burning stove, benches and a safe. During a renovation in early 2004, NRHC historical maintenance staff found an area where a wall had been moved to enclose a small ticket booth. Consulting old records, they were able to remove it and return the depot to its original three large rooms, repaint in its authentic colors and repair the stove.

Ropes is the only depot in Texas that doesn’t bear its town name. The depot preceded the town. Legend holds that area cowboys wanted to call the new rail point “Ropes” for the rope corrals they made to hold livestock before shipping pens were built. It is more likely the depot was named for Horace Ropes, a Santa Fe division engineer who surveyed part of the Panhandle of Texas and eastern New Mexico in 1888. Ropes residents changed the town’s name to Ropesville in 1920.

The Rail Car House was built by the Santa Fe Railway to store track tools, supplies and a handcar. It was a home base for a section gang. Tools were loaded on the handcar and taken up or down the track to make necessary repairs. Every depot had a rail car house.

If railroaders didn’t call the structure a rail car house, they referred to it as a tool or work house. It was built as a box-and-strip structure with pine walls and (originally) a slate roof. A sliding door allowed entry for the handcar. Supply bins and a wall desk were built in one end of the building, and a sliding wooden window provided ventilation.

The 12-by-14-foot Rail Car House was a gift from Lubbock County Commissioner Alton Brazell, who purchased it from the Santa Fe Railroad at Levelland, Texas, and moved it to the NRHC, where it was restored. In 1984, Brazell donated railroad ties, crossing signs, crossing timbers, derail sign, structure sign and a switch control from the removal of the Whiteface to Bledsoe section of the Santa Fe. Railroad employees told Brazell this tool house was identical to those constructed on the Lubbock to Seagraves branch of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1917.