The most northwestern county seat in Texas, Dalhart was founded in 1901 when the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad crossed the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway at the line between Dallam and Hartley counties (hence Dalhart). It became a major cattle-shipping point for the northern ranges of the XIT Ranch (see TP3). Denrock Avenue (named for the two railroads), Dalhart’s principal street, underpasses the railroad at its north end at a pair of 1930s-era concrete and steel bridges, where a monumental stand of grain elevators testifies to the twentieth-century farming history of the Panhandle. Farming led to overplowing the land and thus the Black Blizzards of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Dalhart became the site of a federal erosion-control demonstration project in 1934. The rural landscape of metal tank yards (which have replaced concrete grain elevators), fertilizer distributors, and mechanized irrigation rigs demonstrate the shift after World War II from ranching and dry farming to stock farming and irrigated agriculture using well water from the Ogallala Aquifer.
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