By Dr. Scott White,
Major Willa. V. Johnson moved to Texas in 1882 to make money from cattle. He began with the Kentucky Cattle Raising Company in Crosby County where he bought 200 sections of land. He was vice-president of the company and bought the land as a corporate venture. This ranch became known as the Two Buckle Ranch. Johnson went to Louisville to create the Magnolia in 1883 and raised about $800,000 before returning to Texas and buying 236 sections of land in Borden County from the T&P Railway. He leased the same amount of land from the state at the same time. Johnson created the headquarters for the Magnolia, or MK as it soon became known, where the OB Ranch later set their headquarters. Johnson built a wood-frame house there that served his office and a place for the investors to stay.
Johnson had been a cotton farmer, then the vice president, and part owner, of Bartley-Johnson Company, a distillery in Louisville, Kentucky. He served as a major in the Civil War. He sold his interest in the distillery, packed up his wife and four children, and moved to Colorado City, Texas where he began to buy and lease land for ranching. He set up the Dixie Ranch in Lynn County in 1884 as his own while the other ranches were for investment purposes.
The Magnolia Ranch used the brand MK on most of the livestock and fenced the ranch land. This last action brought Johnson up against the ranching operations of C.C. Slaughter and the Nunn brothers. Slaughter and Nunn had been free grazing the land near a drift fence the men built before Johnson set up the Magnolia. When the MK began fencing the land, a wire-cutting war ensued with reports of miles of Magnolia fence cut in Borden County.
The Magnolia failed in 1884 due to the terrible droughts, severe winters, and the failure of the cattle market. The ranch was pieced out to buyers by the receivership.
Johnson stayed in Colorado City and worked to make the Dixie a success. He put in a system of pipelines and windmills that fed into water tanks for the cattle. He even tried to turn some of the acreage into farmland. But he had to sell the Dixie Ranch in 1902.
Sources:
TSHA Handbook of Texas (online)
First Cattlemen on the Lower Plains of West Texas by Ranch Headquarters Association