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Lea, New Mexico's Last Frontier

by Gil Hinshaw

Published by The Hobbs Daily News-Sun

1976

 Chapter VIll

Hobbs: The Black Gold-Rush City

The Many Towns of Hobbs

James Berry Hobbs

Boom Collapse and Recovery

Hobbs: Oasis on the Llano

Bibliography

Unbroken all before them was the Texas Llano Estacado, treeless, bare, the grass left brown by the passing of winter. The two wagons bearing the family of six and all their earthly possessions had been days now on the eternal flatness, their route veering ever toward the southwest.

Two small girls, almost identical in size and appearance, ran ahead of the straining teams. The girls' movements and laughter expressed their excitement and wonder at the new world in which they found themselves. Far back to the east on their journey, trees had long ago disappeared from the landscape; and now there were horizons as far as they could see in all directions. This new alien world was unlike anything they had ever seen, or imagined, and they were filled with a sense of anticipation. Something as magical as Alice's Wonderland could very well unfold before them just over the next horizon.

Finally, in the very great distance ahead, they were rewarded. A tiny dot appeared. As it grew in size it proved disappointing to the girls' real and imagined adventure. It was another pioneer family, only they were bound in the opposite direction, headed toward the northeast from which the girls and their family had come.

When the two families met and stopped, there was a feeling of joy all around. Even though they were strangers, it was good to know they were not alone in the empty world through which they were passing. "Where are you headed?" called out the man who drove the wagon from the southwest. "We're going to Alpine," the girls' father replied happily. "Don't go to that d--- place," replied the other man. "We have come from there. We couldn't make a living." "Well, neighbor, how far back is the road to New Mexico?"

Had that chance meeting of strangers never taken place in early 1907, Hobbs, New Mexico today could bear any one of a thousand other names, because James Isaac Hobbs did not continue with his family to Alpine to settle in a new home as he had intended. He pointed his two wagons due west and set a course for the Territory of New Mexico.

That long ago day and the chance meeting of migrating families on the Texas Llano were recalled in later years by Minnie Hobbs Byers. She and her twin sister, Winnie, were the little girls who had run ahead of the wagon driven by their father, James Hobbs, bent on homesteading in the West. They arrived in March of 1907 on the site of the future city that would bear the family's name.

The family, which also included two other children, James Berry Hobbs and Ella, had been on the road seven months. In the fall of 1906, James Isaac Hobbs and his wife, Fannie, had sold their farm near May in Brown County, Texas, and embarked on their journey westward. Both Fannie and her son suffered ill health and believed a change in climate might work a cure, and when Mrs. Hobbs learned that good homesteads were available on the western frontier, the decision to leave Brown County was made. En route, they visited relatives and made extra money picking cotton. It was at Coleman that friends advised the Hobbs family to "go to the mountains" for reasons of health and therefore set their sights on Alpine. It also was at Coleman that the first winter weather overtook them and their travels were made through bitter cold temperatures at times.

After their detour away from Alpine they arrived in New Mexico and claimed 160 (later, 320) acres of free land for their homestead. The site to put down roots was not chosen at random. An uncle, Louis Cain, had settled in the area a year or so earlier and, thus, the family was not completely alone on the New Mexico Llano; but the Hobbses were among the first homesteaders. As Minnie Hobbs Byers remembered: "The country was new and untouched." Another homesteader in the vicinity at the time was W. D. Marshall who, perhaps, deserves a small niche in the history of future Hobbs. He obtained lumber and helped James Hobbs build a dug-out to house his family. The site was in the vicinity of present-day First and Texas Streets in Hobbs.

There is evidence that James and Fannie Hobbs were not entirely satisfied with their new home on the wilderness frontier. They lived for a period of time in the wagons which brought them to New Mexico and they talked of moving on further west, possibly to Estancia, at the time a good farming area to the northwest in the central part of the territory. Hobbs, who brought with him his possessions and working capital of $1,000, was better off financially than were most pioneers and could have afforded himself the luxury of shopping for a better homestead. It seems that once the dug-out was completed and his family settled in, he accepted the idea of remaining on the Llano. He continued to develop the homestead by digging a well, acquiring a windmill and settling down to farming his acreage. Later a frame house was constructed on the site.

Another incentive for keeping the Hobbs family on the Llano might have been the continued good health of Fannie and James Berry, The salubrious aspects of Estancia's climate had not been tested. The mother and son had started to feel better shortly after departing Brown County, and this mend in their health had not changed after arriving at the new homesite.

Isolation for the Hobbs family in their new home on the plains was short-lived. During 1908 and 1909 new settlers came in a flood of covered wagons to sprinkle the prairie with homesteads on newly acquired free land, and James Hobbs saw the time was right to enlist his neighbors 1  support for a school. On horseback he rode over the community, which by now numbered about 50 families, and solicited donations to finance construction of a school house. A frame structure measuring 16 by 20 feet, it was located east of what is today the intersection of Marland Boulevard and Dal Paso Street 1  in modern Hobbs.

This rural school, enrolling 42 children, for a three-month term, opened in the fall of 1909, with Lucille Howe as the first teacher. Her salary, however, was not paid from local sources. Under an accord reached between the settlers and the territorial government, the teacher's salary was paid out of territorial funds in Santa Fe, while the local population underwrote the cost of the school building and its maintenance. The latter was rudimentary at best. An account of the early school tells in part that:

Settlers of the Methodist faith held the first formal church services in this building, it is believed, followed by the Baptists, although inter-denominational, or union services as they were often called, were taking place as late as the mid-1920s.

Berry Hobbs took the lead in laying further foundations for a settlement. Sometime in 1909 he established the first general merchandise store to serve the community. The date and location of this first Hobbs business have been disputed by historians and later members of the Hobbs family. His sister, Minnie Hobbs Byers, has identified the location simply as on the old "Midland to Portales trail," a route much used by pioneer freighters of the period to haul supplies by wagon from the railroad in Midland, Texas, to the various points on the Llano in New Mexico. This would place the store definitely on present-day Dal Paso Street in modern Hobbs. Dal Paso, a corruption of the names Dallas and El Paso, was a main wagon route of the period for traffic, hence the notion that it would develop one day as a highway between Dallas and El Paso. It also was crossed by pioneers going in other directions on the Lea Llano, and the younger Hobbs could see the advantages of locating a business where it could cater to travelers on the plains. The store stood slightly northwest of the present Dal Paso and Marland intersection. The rural school was several hundred yards away, across Dal Paso.

James Berry Hobbs, although young, exhibited a good understanding of business enterprise, something that remained with him during his short lifetime. After all, he was a young adult at the time he launched the store operation. Born Dec. 5, 1887 in May, Texas, he was 20 years old when his parents settled on the New Mexico Llano, and was of an age to want independence and his own means of income. Too, it must be pointed out, that rather than remain with his father's farming endeavor, Berry had claimed his own homestead of 160 acres. For a period of time after the store was built he made his home in the same building.

The date of the store venture is inexact, but strong evidence sets its opening in 1909, although later writers have given the year as 1910. The essential fact pointing to the earlier time frame for the Hobbs store is the post office operation which eventually was maintained in the back of the building. The government required that all rural pioneer postal permits be granted only after the local post office official had carried the mail without charge for three months; and since most all historians concur that Berry Hobbs first opened the store and then obtained a post office, it seems likely that the store began in 1909 because the Hobbs post office became an official function on Jan. 28, 1910.

Hobbs, New Mexico, came into existence on that date, but it would be 18 years before it could be called a settlement, and longer still before it would mature into a city. Over the long years ahead, past the creation of Lea County in 1917, the great blizzard of 1918 and the drought and recession of the early 1920s, Hobbs would remain a rural community with a store, post office, school, several homesteads and the ever-present windmills pointing into the wind. These first institutions created but a thin veneer of American civilization at Hobbs. Otherwise, the community remained steadfastly a product of the Llano frontier: Isolated, inconvenient, even harsh for the people who wrestled with the stubborn land for sustenance.

Hobbs, in its beginnings, is unique among the cities that survive today in Lea County. It existed longer than any of the others without becoming what could be defined as a settlement or village. While in their incipient years Lovington, Eunice, Jal and Tatum attracted several businesses and even newspapers, Hobbs remained but a place sequestered in the wilderness. Once free of this restraint, it was destined to become larger than all of the other towns and cities placed together.

Before official mail service was brought to the Hobbs settlers, the nearest postal facility to provide mail was at Roberts, later Nadine, about six miles to the south. After the Hobbs Post Office began service, Monument, the settlement 15 miles to the southwest, became the point where the Hobbs postal pouch was delivered and picked up daily. Monument received and sent out mail for the entire area through Carlsbad, some 60 miles to the west in Eddy County.

Receiving and sending mail from the Roberts-Nadine post office was inconvenient, as Minnie Hobbs Byers, points out, and Berry Hobbs, aware of this situation, saw a further opportunity to improve his store operation by bringing the mails directly to the residents of his community.2 He reasoned that if settlers had to come to his store for mail service, they also would be tempted to make purchases. The new post office, then, was a lure-an indirect form of advertising for the Hobbs Mercantile Company. Apparently the U. S. Post Office Department selected the name Hobbs for Berry's mail office. When making application for the post office, he had suggested the names Taft and Prairieview; however, when the permit was granted government officials designated the name Hobbs.

For reasons unknown, Berry was not the first postmaster at Hobbs. official federal post office records show the title held by George W. Rogers during the year 1910. He was followed by a C. Land in 1911 and 1912, and, inexplicably, no postmaster is listed for the years 1913-1914. William Boswell is the postmaster of record for the period 1915-1919, the latter year being near the time when Berry Hobbs sold his store to Bismarck Turner for whom Turner Street is named in modern Hobbs. Mrs. Turner held the postmaster's job in 1919-1920.

The migration of settlers to the Hobbs community was at its height in 1909Igio and virtually completed by the beginning of 1911. As that year began the Hobbs family had many neighbors. Records show the following homesteaders, or claims, within a five-mile radius of the Hobbs store and post office:

E. H. Byers, D. 0. Rogers, W. D. Marshall, S, A. Thompson, L. C. Ball, Otto Kuhn, John West, L. A. White, B. L. Thorpe, M. C. Storey, W. A. Dunnam, Louis Cain, H. P. Vest, G. R. Littrell, E. J. Thompson, Horace Howard, John Bilbrey, S. R. Payton, Morton Wright, E. Griggs, Mrs. S. J. Howard, James Sparks, M. T. McCormick and A. J. McWilliams.

Of some of those neighbors and the quality of life in pioneer days, Minnie Hobbs Byers later would reconstruct this revealing picture:

The frontier character of the Hobbs community prevailed for more than a decade and a half after the post office was founded. Some of the homesteaders' children grew up to take their parents places on the land; some lived with their mothers temporarily in Lovington during the fall and winter months to attend high school; others went on to nearby institutions of higher learning such as the College of Artesia; while still others, facing the duress of drought and a depressed economy on the Llano, moved away to distant places to find jobs and make homes for themselves.

The roads in and out of the community remained wagon trails that led eventually to railroads more than 70 or 100 miles distant, and from those railheads there were even greater distances to great centers of commerce where technology and industrialization provided the wonders of comfortable and convenient American life in vast quantity. Prior to 1927-1928, automobiles in the Hobbs community were a rarity, buggies, wagons and horses serving as a mainstay of transportation. One of the first owners of a gasoline-driven vehicle was Steve Taylor, who is remembered by "oldtimers" for this fact and because he and his conveyance often were called upon in emergencies to take an ailing person to the nearest doctor by the fastest means over the rural trail that wound by Knowles and thence to Lovington. This was a distance of more than 22 miles.

Some telling glimpses of the Hobbs community's agrarian way of life on the Llano are provided in these excerpts from The Lovington Leader of 1920:

The writer of the last news item took a great deal of poetic license by calling the community a "town" which it was not. In 1920, the same institutions that had existed in 1910 made up the Hobbs community, with the only major change being the relocation of the Hobbs store to the property of Bismarck Turner at another point on present Dal Paso Street. The building was moved after Turner purchased the store from Berry Hobbs. Sometime about 1921 the property was acquired again by its original owner, while the post office was separated from the store and moved to the farm home of Ernest Byers in the vicinity of what is now East Main Street. Byers, a brother-in-law of Berry Hobbs, enclosed a portion of his porch to serve as the Hobbs Post Office, and from there he dispensed and received the mails. He served as postmaster of Hobbs until 1930.

In 1923, James Isaac Hobbs, one of the community's first pioneers, died probably without ever dreaming that his family's name and lands would lend themselves shortly to the building of an important major city, that hidden just under his homestead was one of the nation's major oil pools, and that it would make the semi-arid Llano bloom with more progress than had been possible with all the water pumped by the settlers' windmills. Born in 1855 in Tennessee, he had gone to Texas as a child of 12 to seek his fortune. Most of his life's work was toil with the soil-the land, Near the land he had homesteaded he was buried in the earth, unaware of how close he came to finding his fortune.

His daughter, Minnie Hobbs Byers, wrote of him:

James Isaac Hobbs' widow, Fannie, lived on until 1942 and was known to many in the community as "Grandma Hobbs."

Top of the Page - The Many Towns of Hobbs -  James Berry Hobbs -  Boom Collapse and Recovery -  Hobbs: Oasis on the Llano -  Bibliography

The Many Towns of Hobbs

Within a matter of months in 1928-1929, the tranquil farmlands and mesquite-covered range of the Hobbs community underwent a transformation that would lead to the creation of not one, but four would-be cities: Hobbs and New Hobbs which became towns with separate municipal governments; All Hobbs which remained nothing more than a settlement; and Borger, destined to remain a townsite until it disappeared. It would take nine years to bring this conglomeration together as one unit under one government, that of the modern City of Hobbs.

Behind the wild proliferation of settlements and the wave of humanity that swept over the Llano Estacado here was one impelling force: Oil. It must not be believed that gushers of crude oil came geyser-like out of the plains to touch off what eventually amounted to near bedlam in land speculation and building in the Hobbs community. It took only the news that exploration was beginning to cloud men's minds, inspire them with visions of great wealth and plunge them into the vortex of a black gold rush that spread over the long uneventful plains. Many of these men were old hands at the oil-boom game. They were the veterans of boom towns such as Oklahoma City, Borger, Burkburnett, Amarillo and Wink. Others were getting into the rush for the first time, having watched it advance north and west out of Texas into Lea County where the first important discoveries were made at Maljamar and Jal.

So, the word, sometimes embellished, sometimes understated, went out late in 1927 that sequestered on the Llano was a place called Hobbs where drilling was underway. This became momentous news for those wise in the ways of oil, especially if they had learned previously that leasing had taken place in the same area and that the results of magnometer tests on the earth's surface there held out great expectations.

Thus, the stage was set at Hobbs for the unfolding of one of the last great oil booms of the West-studded with all the classic trappings: Instant towns that operated around the clock, instant wealth pouring from the earth, crews of soiled and sunburned working men, flocks of developers, promoters, adventurers and professional people of every description moving in the vanguard. Before this drama was concluded the rural Hobbs community would be assimilated by the technological-industrial world of America.

Without pomp and only a handful of men The Midwest Refining Company (now Amoco) began drilling Oct. 12, 1927 on the desolate plains near Hobbs, the northeast corner of Sec. 9, T. 19 S., R. 38 E.). Midwest's Roswell manager, Ronald K. DeFord, had come to Hobbs in September of 1927 to establish the drilling site. Years later he wrote this vivid description of what he found in the community at that time:

The store mentioned in DeFord's narrative was the old Hobbs Mercantile Co., sold before 1927 to Bob White by Berry Hobbs, who was elected Lea County treasurer in 1926 and had taken office Jan. 1, 1927. He would hold this position for three years.

Despite all sorts of adversities, including a fire which burned the wooden derrick, the drill disclosed the first oil on June 13, 1928 at 4,065 feet. On November 8 of that year, the hole reached 4,220 feet, having penetrated all the oil-bearing beds, and Midwest's State No. 1, the discovery well of the future Hobbs oil pool, was completed, producing 700 barrels of oil per day on state land leased by the Will Terry ranch. Today, 48 years later, this historic well, still produces quietly near the intersection of Grimes Street and Stanolind Road in Hobbs, with most passersby unaware of the furor its gestation and birth created nearly half a century ago.

No one remembers who first was in the vanguard of the legions of promoters and fortune-seekers that began descending on the Hobbs community, or when they first arrived. Undoubtedly among the first were land and townsite developers, who came, surveyed the situation and returned to their points of origin to make plans to capitalize on the future promises of Hobbs, or to forget their visit to the edge of New Mexico's last frontier. Those with foresight, or intuition, could discern two frontiers: The advancing one of oil-energy to turn the nation's wheels and drive its machinery-and the receding one that had been the sparsely populated wilderness. One writer has described the march of humanity on the Hobbs community in this way:

Appropriately, Berry Hobbs once more played the role of founder. Although he was county treasurer, he joined ranks (probably in early June 1928) with the Seminole, Texas, banker, Buck Curry, to promote the first townsite on land that was the Berry Hobbs homestead. Almost immediately the developers disposed of their holdings, and around this transaction, The Lovington Leader of June 29, 1928 built this report:

The Leader revealed further that lots were selling briskly, that several new buildings were in the planning stages and that "preparations are going forward for getting ready for caring for the large influx of people who are expected to come almost immediately." In a story several weeks later, the newspaper reported that lots were selling at prices of "$750 to $1,000... no uncommon asking price..."

A Texas developer, A. C. (Art) Chesher, acquired the townsite from Berry Hobbs and Curry, christened it the New Hobbs Development Company, and proceeded with the sale of lots in an area that today is bound by Marland Boulevard on the north, and Stanolind Road on the south. It was defined by present Dal Paso Street to the east and on the west, today's Grimes Street. Within a little more than a year this would become the location of New Hobbs, a city complete with all the services afforded the public by a municipality of that era.

While the New Hobbs Development Company was thriving in what is now South Hobbs, two other settlements, one of them also a townsite company, were forming on the New Hobbs boundaries. Just east across the country road, often called the Jal Road (now Dal Paso), and south of Marland, the settlement that would become All Hobbs was taking shape, but no townsite company had formed to push its growth. Meanwhile, just across Marland Boulevard and to the north of the New Hobbs Development Company's territory, the Hobbs Townsite Company was being put together by financial interests in Texas and New Mexico. This company's domain included all of the land north to the Sanger pasture (today Sanger Street), running from Jal Road on the east to present Grimes Street on the west. Here the first town would form within less than a year and would be called Hobbs, or sometimes, Old Hobbs. 3

The Hobbs Townsite Company, incorporated Aug. 7, 1928, included a small army of share-holders and officers over a very short span of time. The principals at the time of incorporation were, K. F. Albright and T. Wade Potter of Littlefield, Texas; J. J. Carson and A. L. Gurley of Clovis; and A. G. Trout of Hobbs; however when the stock was issued, J. R. Harris, soon to be the first mayor of Hobbs, acquired the stock of Albright and Potter and was elected the company president. Carson was elected vice president, while Trout took the title of secretary and treasurer. Trout resigned on Jan. 3, 1929 and the vacancy was filled by A. W. Board of Hobbs, a longtime justice of the peace. Before Aug. 24, 1929, L. H. Tomlinson, W. A. Dunnam and H. D. McKinley became stockholders, and on that date the company was purchased for $2,000 by W. M. Snyder, a Lovington automobile dealer, and Carleton Clinton. At the time of purchase 567 lots had been sold. Before the end of 1929, Seth Alston, the Lovington banker, and C. L. Beatty became stockholders and Snyder was elected president. In 1935, Clinton and his wife, Jennie, became the sole owners. They dissolved the company on Dec. 20, 1944.

As time passed, the Hobbs Townsite Company did not focus narrowly on the Promotion of land sales. Its leaders delved into community needs and problems and established services that became lasting landmarks in the town. Notable among these is the Texas & New Mexico Railroad, brought to Hobbs in 1930 because the townsite company granted a free right-of-way over its land; Clinton Park, which serves Hobbs to this day as a playground for children and as the site of one of New Mexico's most impressive libraries; the town's first paving (in 1931), three blocks of West Taylor Street at a cost of $4,000; gifts of land to the Salvation Army and for a hospital site; and the inducements of low rent, a strong factor in persuading several oil well supply companies to make their headquarters in the town.

Several Hobbs Townsite ventures ended sadly because of the economic collapse that came with the Great Depression. Among these was its investment in the Hobbs State Bank and in a town newspaper.

Newspapers, both weekly and daily, appeared in such array during Hobbs, greening years that no one could have been too far separated from the printed word. One of the very first of which we have record is The Hobbs Oil Driller, a weekly that appeared on September 6, 1928. How long it published, or in which of the two townsites' confines is unknown. Only one copy is known to be in existence. Apparently this courrier of the day's events was short-lived.

As 1928 waned there was sufficient news to fill a small four-column, onesheet weekly, the usual dimensions of boom-town newspapers, which because they were transient in nature-hoping to make a quick profit in the eruption of fast money-were set by hand, and printed on equipment that could be moved speedily enough to catch the next boom area.

The pastoral face of the Hobbs community was changing rapidly. Tents and shacks of every description were beginning to throng both sides of the dirt road that ran west to Carlsbad. They started first in a cluster around White's general store-post office and windmill and advanced westward along both sides of the wagon trail. This main drag was first to achieve a name, Carlsbad Street, but with years the logic of calling it such seemed too obvious and it was given its present metropolitan-sounding name, Broadway.

Hotel Hobbs, the area's first, was being completed. Its advent had been announced June 1 in The Lovington Leader which proclaimed:

Meantime, in Lovington, the State Telephone Company, owner of that city's communications system, had begun building the first line between the county seat and Hobbs. When it reached the latter town in 1929, a single toll station was placed in the new post office on Main Street in New Hobbs, while the line continued southward to provide Jal with a single telephone box. As Hobbs bulged with people and businesses over the next three years, switchboards were installed in New Hobbs, All Hobbs and in Hobbs. By 1932, the company could count 320 telephones, all serving business firms in the three areas of Hobbs.

Drilling in the Hobbs area had intensified by the beginning of 1929, widening the breach that incoming humanity was making in the Llano wilderness. At the end of January close to 10 wooden business houses, separated by wide intervals of dead grass and sand, flanked the sides of Carlsbad Street; and as spring arrived, the most noticeable improvement being made on this frontier thoroughfare was the level surface given it by a scraper blade, which, incidentally, straightened the sides of the road by cutting the north and south banks in a straight line.

The Lovington Leader of March 15, 1929 gave a capsule report on what was taking place in the territory of its old neighbor to the south:

Hobbs: The Black Gold-Rush City 197

J. W. Carpenter was proprietor of this first source of electrical energy, incorporated as the Plains Electric Company. It sent out over its lines an astonishing 40 kilowatts of power to serve 29 customers. Carpenter and officials of his parent company, the Texas Power and Light Company, appear to have been poor judges of what an oil discovery can do to demands for power and by September of that year they had ordered additional generating equipment to increase their output capacity for the ever4ncreasing number of customers. On November 13, Carpenter appeared before the village council to request a franchise for his utility company, the parent of today's New Mexico Electric Service Company.

Delivery of water to the first few customers was in the province of private enterprise, the utility being owned by the Hobbs Water Company. The water franchise was issued by the village of Hobbs in December to J. T. Godsey, who merged his interest in 1930 with the Hobbs Gas Company, the owner of both utilities until the water system was brought under municipal ownership.

Although there was an abundance of natural gas in the Hobbs area, this service was somewhat behind the other main utilities in reaching inhabitants of the growing community. In fact, it did not get started until an election and a district court suit settled the question of who should hold the franchise for providing gas. The new town board of trustees had granted a franchise to C. G. Scott and Jimmy Sullivan for this purpose, but in the meantime, two other promoters, recorded only as Adams and Mann, had won a franchise from the Lea County Commission to provide service to Hobbs customers. The town officials won a court injunction restraining the latter purveyors of gas from continuing with their delivery system on the argument that "the holders of the county franchise were without authority to put in the gas pipe line and that the town board of Hobbs was the only body which could legally issue a franchise for this purpose."

Reporting on the election to uphold the Hobbs board's decision to grant the franchise to Scott and Sullivan, The Lovington Leader of Oct. 4, 1929 carried this story:

With all of the obstacles cleared, Roy C. Moyston, who had moved to Hobbs in 1928, acquired the interests of Scott and Sullivan and opened the Hobbs Gas Company before the end of 1929 and was supplying 300 customers.

Four blocks to the south, across Marland Street, the officials of the New Hobbs Development Company were working frantically to bring promising en. terprises to their fledgling settlement, New Hobbs. By mid-1929, their still unofficial village could boast of having the only newspaper in the Hobbs area. This was The New Hobbs [New Mexico] Reporter, which rolled its first edition off the press on June 27, 1929. It appeared weekly until May 7, 1931 when the rigors of depression were closing in over the oil towns.

This publication had competition very shortly from the neighbor town of Hobbs. There on Nov. 8, 1929, The Hobbs News, the original ancestor of today's Hobbs Daily News-Sun, made its debut as a weekly newspaper. As the oil boon, reached fever intensity the following year, the publication would become daily, return to weekly status in the depression years and finally become part of the city's present daily newspaper. This boom town journal would have many marriages and numerous relatives before the birth of the News-Sun in 1937, as we shall see later in this chapter.

In both Hobbs and New Hobbs growth continued to accelerate as 1929 moved to mid-year and past. Newly arrived residents of the time could witness an urban area materializing almost daily as new businesses went up to the sound of hammers and saws ringing out across the Llano grasslands. Hobbs itself seems to have experienced more impetus in the unfolding panorama of growth and thus was first to form a municipal government.

Village government was formed on the night of Sept. 5. 1929 when a group of men met in the Beal Service Station. Named as mayor was I.M. Harris, while the trustees' posts went to D. H. Blakley, Ed Cathey, George Roach and Walter Tomlinson. They selected as village clerk Mary Francis Beal, who received a monthly salary of $100. Affairs of no great moment seem to have been pressing at this first session of local government, but the board of trustees did approve Hobbs' first entry in the code book. It was Ordinance No. 1 establishing the seal. It read:

This first uneventful meeting was no preview of things to come. In the months ahead, the village trustees would enact all manner of ordinances to provide for the safety and welfare of the residents. Some even seem puzzling today. For example, Ordinance No. 19 ordered all males between the ages of 21 and 60 to pay a poll tax of $1 per year, and it was mandatory that each individual have on his person at all times proof of the tax payment in the form of a receipt. The individual who had no means of meeting this payment was given the option of paying in labor to the city, the amount to be "one-half day's work of not more than five hours employed on the city's streets, alleys, parks or other municipal works."

Within the next 12 months the new village board took a firm hold on the reins of government by hiring employes and vesting authority in them, and through the laws that were approved. One has the impression, however, that many of the men and women designated for municipal duty were on a parttime basis. M. H. Showater was the first city attorney and with his resignation on Jan. 8, 1930, he was replaced by Robert A. Estes, who was paid in an odd manner: $5 from each fine levied by the city; Miss Jessie Adkins was paid $25 per month to serve as city treasurer; J. P. White was appointed head of the sanitation department at an unspecified salary; Charles S. Beal, husband of the city clerk and owner of the service station where village government was first formed, was named police magistrate, also at a pay scale not recorded; and the city hired a fire chief (not named) at a rate of $50 per month.

In addition to the police magistrate, the city had another enforcer of law and order reminiscent of Wild West frontier days. He was one Leo W. De Cordova, given the ominous-sounding appellation of "Vinegaroon" and hired first as village marshal and later as the first chief of police. This great hulking man, described as "pear-shaped" by those who remember him, sought no trouble nor did he accept any. He held his own with the rough element that descended on Hobbs in 1930 when it became a rip-roaring town, and on occasion was known to shoot it out with a desperado.

Undoubtedly Mr. Vinegaroon took his cue from the general tone that seemed to prevail as the town grew wild. It was one of ignoring what one resident of those days called the "peaceful illegalities." Some of these will be depicted later in this chapter. The wrong-doers who went too far in offending the sensibilities of the law-abiding were placed in the Hobbs jail, which by today's standards was a place of cruel and unusual punishment. It was a large, all-metal tank chained to posts under the broiling sun. Shocking as this may seem, it must be kept in mind that the village under the pressure of boomtown times made the best of a bad situation in the midst of what was still a frontier.

Even more amazing is the fact that Hobbs maintained an official "pest house" where were kept those hapless individuals who contracted highly infectious diseases that could touch off an epidemic. This is borne out by the June 11, 1930 village minutes which report the payment of $70 to J. L. Maddox for his services in nursing a case of smallpox. The pest house, a common institution of the 19th century, seems oddly out of place in an American town of the 1930s.

Vinegaroon appears to have served the village well during the roaring zenith of the boom in 1930. Abruptly and without a recorded explanation he was fired by the village on June 10, 1931. The town was by then plunged into the throes of the depression and more than half of its once teeming population had moved away The trustees approved a final payment of $1,108.46 for this unusual enforcer.

Regardless of the heavy flow of money from new oil, the village government had financial embarrassments, the severity of which is illustrated by each of the trustees placing $100 of his own money in the municipal treasury on June 11, 1930 to help tide the operation over until funds were available from tax collections. Enormous amounts (for the times) of money must have been required to establish a town on the barren plains, because as in all other Lea County settlements at their inception, construction materials had to be shipped in. Other costs accrued in establishing facilities and services for the first time. Oil discoveries carried their liabilities for towns as reflected in the wear and tear on streets. The Hobbs Board of Trustees on June 19, 1930 is found ordering the grading of streets that included Carlsbad from Dalmont to Cochran, Taylor from Turner to Cochran, Shipp, Linam and Thorp. Other expenditures that year were for the beginning of the municipal sewer system, the start of the first permanent fire department and the hiring of Harry Gurst as city engineer.

The population explosion in Hobbs, New Hobbs and All Hobbs toward the latter half of 1929 and through 1930 is best viewed in terms of school enrollment. The Hobbs School, still part of the Lea County School System, opened in the fall of 1929 in the building across Dal Paso Street in New Hobbs with Mettie Jordan (later county school superintendent) as principal, Ernest Manning teaching the upper grades and Maggie Lang as the lower grade teacher. By the end of that year student enrollment required construction of an additional room and hiring of yet another teacher, Alma Lane, to take charge of primary grades. Before the school year terminated in the spring of 1930 the school had 298 youngsters in attendance.

At this point the rural school was abandoned. The village of Hobbs opened its own educational facility, complete with high school grades in the fall of 1930 at the site of present Will Rogers School; and New Hobbs, not to be outdone, opened a similar educational institution on Main Street. Both schools also had their superintendents, H. L. Groner serving in this capacity in the Hobbs Schools, while Doug Smith held the same post in New Hobbs Schools. With the beginning of that school year, the faculty required for the two academic operations reached mammoth proportions: 53 teachers. Dr. J. L. Burke, (later Jal School superintendent), who joined the New Hobbs Schools that year as consultant and later high school principal, estimates enrollment at New Hobbs as high as 300 students.

The dual school system, which only served to heighten the rivalry between the two towns, is termed today by Dr. Burke as a "de facto" situation. -Since only the county could sanction the creation of such institutions, he feels that neither of the two towns' schools operated under any type of academic legality. This was remedied by two factors in the following years. In the summer of 1932, Hobbs and New Hobbs school boards reached an accord on consolidation of the two educational systems, and that fall they began a combined operation. A special measure, approved by the New Mexico Legislature in 1933, conferred legal status on this school system. Few modern schools have had a stranger chapter in their early history.

Shortly after the calendar page was turned to 1930, the oil boom that had been building in intensity at Hobbs suddenly escalated to almost staggering dimensions. Humble Oil Company's No. 1-A Bowers well about three miles northwest of Hobbs came in, producing 9,720 barrels of crude oil per day. The effect was electric. The rush to reach this new bonanza now became a stampede of humanity that overflowed in Hobbs, New Hobbs and All Hobbs.

No amount of existing facilities could accommodate the press of people to the new oilfields; and although men worked night and day to construct hotels, "shotgun" houses and shacks, there was never room enough for those needing shelter. The permanent and semi-permanent buildings soon stood in a sea of shanties and tents flapping in the wind, hence the name Rag Town, or Shanty Town, was sometimes applied in derogatory references to the villages of Hobbs. People took refuge where they could find it as verified by Minnie Hobbs Byers who recalled that a farm chicken house left unguarded would overnight become the abode of a squatter. Some imaginative individuals would bring their own little hut loaded on the back of a truck and anchor it to the earth on any unclaimed spot of sand. One of the widely used types of instant housing was the "park tent," a structure that contained a wooden floor, surrounded by corrugated iron several feet high and topped off with a tent stretched over a framework.

Historian Raymond Waters recaptured this tessera from the wild mosaic the towns formed with these lines:

At the height of this in-pouring of people in 1930, some historians contend, the population of the combined towns and areas reached 20,000. This figure, perhaps, has been greatly exaggerated with time and retelling. The actual number was a great deal lower as this Associated Press story, filed from Hobbs on Oct. 24, 1930, clearly substantiates:

As this boom moved toward its inevitable end, it was common to find community leaders predicting a population of 20,OW by the turn of 1930. Real estate man A. G. Gurley, a promoter of the Hobbs townsite, made such a prediction which grabbed headlines in the May 27 issue of  The Hobbs TimesHerald, which itself had come into existence four days earlier as Hobbs's first daily newspaper. With his prognostications Gurley also reported the sale of $75,000 worth of real estate "within the past 10 days." He estimated 80 per cent of all property in the downtown business section of the Hobbs Townsite Company already had been sold. The same newspaper story impressed its readers with more startling facts by revealing that 20 lumber companies were in existence and Unable to fill orders for lumber needed in the building explosion, although the railroad was shipping 40 to 50 cars daily loaded with materials. Of population growth the story related:

At that time 57 drilling rigs were operating in the Hobbs field, and more locations were marked for drilling.

The growth of the many Hobbs settlements was boundless those first five months in 1930, and almost daily a new notch in community progress was reported. April and May, alone, were months to remember: The first train of the Texas & New Mexico line, not yet completed to Lovington, arrived in Hobbs on April 19 with Gov. Richard C. Dillon and a platoon of state (one was Corporation Commissioner Hugh Williams) and railroad officials alighting to attend a massive celebration; in May two promoters, whose names were recorded only as Malloch and Singleton, announced that the new town of Borger, located four and one-half miles northwest of Hobbs, was platted and ready to receive a steady stream of buyers and businesses; the officials developing New Hobbs, taking the lead in transportation, began construction at the east end of Main Street on a new airport to replace the temporary landing strip where between two and five airplanes were landing daily; and on May 28, the new controlling interest in the New Hobbs townsite company was sold to an Oklahoma capitalist by the name of John J. Harden.

This news must have had traumatic effect on the Hobbs townsite investors when they realized who Harden was because he was backed by unlimited capital and financially could out-distance and out-do any project which the Hobbs investors could afford. Harden had acquired the New Hobbs townsite stock owned by A.C. Chesher thus leaving only one other major investor, J.A. Johnson, a Tulsa banker. Harden, who had made his fortune in a paving enterprise during the Oklahoma City oil boom, had financed projects in Amarillo and was the primary owner of a successful nation-wide cemetery business which specialized in Rose Hill burial gardens.

Although the Times-Herald's account of the Harden acquisition stated that "everyone in greater Hobbs rejoices" at the news, it is difficult to imagine that this news brought much joy to the investors north of Marland Boulevard in Hobbs. After all, Harden was billed as the "developer of Oklahoma City."

Harden's drive and deeds surpassed all expectations. He changed the name of New Hobbs Development Company to Lea-Mex Development Company, selected A. M. Spencer as his general manager and inaugurated a building program that would establish lasting monuments in his new city. Among these were the 110room, all-brick Harden Hotel on Main Street, the elegant $45,000 Derrick motionpicture theater, the area's first hospital and a new post office. There is evidence, though that the Harden Hotel, a classic for its time and the largest public structure in Lea County for many years was not the brain child of the Oklahoma investor. In the Times-Herald story announcing John Harden's association with New Hobbs, the writer added, "Work will be continued on the new brick, fireproof hotel, according to officials in charge. Complete plans and specifications for the building were brought to the city Saturday..."

Most of Harden's fine monuments did not survive. After more than 40 years of service the four-story hotel was condemned by the city and razed in 1974; the Derrick Theater, the community's second after the Ritz was opened in 1929 on Carlsbad Street, was moved and eventually closed; and the New Hobbs Post office, which opened in 1930 with Mrs. Glenn Boyd as postmaster and 500 boxes for patrons, was closed in 1932. 4   Only the hospital building, converted to living quarters, remains today as the Roosevelt Apartments. Dr. Coy S. Stone, who is still in general practice, was one of the hospital's first doctors, as were Drs. Conner and McClean. Hobbs first physician was Dr. Allen Terrell who came to the village in 1929.

Although New Hobbs on May 15 had been declared by the Lea County Commission as an incorporated village it did not come into being as a functioning city government until June 24, 1930 when the residents elected Charles Lea Yeager as first mayor and to the board of trustees, D. R. Miller, Frank Spraker, Will Yelverton and Joe B. Brown. W. H. Fescenmeyer was elected village clerk. By July the government had begun to move into its new city hall, the north half occupied by the police court where Judge J. L. Emerson presided, while the south portion of the structure was the domain of the mayor and other city offices. A jail building was constructed behind New Hobbs City Hall.

New Hobbs also quickly developed a zoning law of sorts which stipulated that a nine-block area was restricted to homes meeting these specifications: They must cost not less than $1,500, and all out-buildings were to be set at least 70 feet away from the home. This and other measures made for more orderly growth than was being experienced in neighboring Hobbs, In a story dated July 23, 1930, The Santa Fe New Mexican made this comparison highlighting the difference in growth patterns:

The writer proved himself clairvoyant, but not until much later. As for rivalry, this is an understatement. If anything, animosity existed between the many factions that lined up with New Hobbs on the one side and Hobbs on the other. Dr. J. L. Burke, employed in the New Hobbs school at that time, recalls that the bitter feeling even extended to children of the two separate systems, and on occasion led to fights when a youngster from New Hobbs encountered one of his peer group from the Hobbs schools. 5

An editorialist on the Times-Herald showed his perception of and sensitivity to the multi-community situation when he penned this editorial that appeared May 23, 1930:

Reading between the lines one can find the conviction that the union of these towns and communities would eliminate the duplication of services and municipal personnel and bring peace among the factions, turning their energies toward the achievement of common goals. Profit and prosperity predominated in most minds and cooperation through consolidation of government and community units did not fit in the scene for that time. In fact, a referendum on annexation even as late as Jan. 13, 1932 was defeated in all but one area, the then Highland Park where residents voted 34 to 21 to join Hobbs. In the Grimes Addition, the vote was none for and five against, while in All Hobbs, the opposition drew 20 votes to one lone ballot favoring the proposal. Since Borger never became a settlement, the question of its annexation was not involved.

Hobbs and New Hobbs by mid-1930 had become raucous, open towns. New oil and new money seemed the ingredients for a sort of madness that fostered an atmosphere not unlike the fabled gold-rush towns of the earlier Wild West and Alaska. This generated enormities, extravagances and exaggerations in conduct and appetite and where these exist with few controls there are always men and women who come to make fortunes from foibles.

These were towns that never slept. The night spots were also day spots, their clamor and rowdiness continuing 24 hours a day, offering liquor and women, music and gambling-all in an era when either federal or state laws forbid all but the most sedate entertainment. Federal Prohibition and state and local laws against prostitution remained outside the jurisdiction of the two Hobbses. Many of the taverns, or clubs, were also dance halls by night and skating rinks by day. After sunset the patron bought a roll of tickets entitling him to a dance with each ticket. The same was true for the day-time roller rinks.

Among the clubs that achieved a degree of fame or notoriety were the Petroleum, Ramona and the Tokyo. 6 Arthur J. Linn, a Santa Fe visitor to Hobbs of that era wrote this memorable impression of the night life that held sway:

Early in 1930, the Hobbs village government apparently had intended to circumvent the evolving of a ‘sin city' by approving Ordinance No. 6, euphemistically called "a list of misdemeanors and offenses which were prohibited." This restrictive law could have cleared and closed the gathering places of indulgence and dissipation had the city been able to afford the number of Peace officers sufficient to enforce the rules. The ordinance read:

Another portion of this ordinance made it illegal to operate a "hop joint," while yet another section outlawed the carrying of deadly weapons, to wit: Pistols, revolvers, sling shots, loaded or sword cases, or sand bags, anything that can be dangerous, and all residents found "in the night time in an outhouse, shed, or unoccupied building and not giving good account of self would be fined."

A Hobbs ordinance approved in June 1930 suggests the city had resigned itself to the existence of the "peaceful illegalities" and should realize revenue from them. This law ordered that all dance halls be licensed at a rate of $1 per day and for not less than three months at a time. Mayor James Murray Jr., sometime later the head of New Hobbs* government, took a parallel approach to placing curbs on unbridled night amusement activities. He was successful in imposing a tax on each cabaret to defray the cost of employing additional peace officers. When one club owner refused to pay, his honor and the New Hobbs police chief padlocked the building until the reluctant man agreed to the tax terms.

Beyond the night life, the streets of this brawling young giant on the Llano were caught up in the din, uproar, dirt and sights and smell of the oil boom. Residents and visitors of 1930 remember the impression of black-the color of the streets that had been oiled with crude to keep down dust; the blare of the town's radio speaker, placed on a high pole near Dal Paso Street for public listening and that the conclusion of the "Amos ‘n Andy" show was a curfew of sorts for the lawabiding; and that flares from burning gas brought almost daylight conditions to the streets after sunset.

A writer for the New Mexico Highway Journal came to Hobbs in 1930 and left this word vignette to capture the flavor of the place:

The journalist recorded that he had heard rumors that beer was 50 cents a glass and water 10 cents a glass for the first one and five cents for each one thereafter, but was unable to verify these facts.

Along the streets of the several Hobbs were 19 poolhalls, 34 drug stores, 53 barbershops and 50 oil field supply houses by the middle of 1930, and the Hobbs pool was producing 150,000 barrels of crude oil a day. 7 Production had doubled itself in the month of June, alone, while the going wage for the average oilfield worker was a whopping $125 per month. Without knowing, the towns nourished by oil had reached the apex of their boom. They were less than six months away from the time when the Great Depression would sweep over the Llano in wave after wave of falling oil prices.

Top of the Page - The Many Towns of Hobbs -  James Berry Hobbs -  Boom Collapse and Recovery -  Hobbs: Oasis on the Llano -  Bibliography

James Berry Hobbs

In all the turmoil of boom and growth in 1930 it probably struck no chord of recognition with most of the new oil people of the Hobbs towns when James Berry Hobbs died March 10 of that year. He was only 42 years old.

It was his foresight and energy as a youth that led to the long chain of events culminating in the birth of the black gold-rush city. Had he not given the community a store and a post office, establishing the heart and name of a settlement, the many cities of Hobbs might never have existed where they did on the Llano Estacado. Apparently it was never his intention that the settlement should splinter. He had founded a townsite, hoping this would become Hobbs. Instead, those who succeeded him on the land established divergent aims for the early pattern of development that came with the riches of oil.

He died disinherited from those riches, according to his son, Berry Lee Hobbs, who, like his father, is a Lea County farmer. The founder profited not at all from the great wealth that emanated from his former lands, the son related. He said his father sought the office of county treasurer only because it paid a steady salary which he needed. The senior Hobbs was living in Lovington and serving the last year of his final two-year term when he died of pneumonia.

Historians can only wonder if James Berry Hobbs was disappointed with the boom spectacle unfolding on the once remote lands where he had lived and planned for the future. A quiet man not given to flamboyance, he probably did not understand the wild life styles exhibited in the excitement of an oil boom, nor the unorthodox pattern of a portion of the society it molded.

His widow, Ellen Colkin, daughter of a pioneer family in the Hobbs community, survived until June 29, 1956. They were the parents of two other sons, Roy Dawson Hobbs, who died in the military service in World War II, and James Richard Hobbs, a resident of Lubbock, Texas.

At the high point of the oil boom newspapering in the Hobbs towns was enjoying its own pinnacle of prosperity. Two weeklies, The Hobbs Times and The Herald Tribune, records show, were born the same day, May 16, 1930, yet little more than a week later, May 23, they had merged to form The Hobbs TimesHerald. This publication in turn, was absorbed by The Hobbs News on Aug. 24, 1930, and the latter newspaper became Hobbs' first daily when it rolled off the press Dec. 31 of that year as The Hobbs Daily News. It published daily until Jan. 14, 1931 when the effects of the depression forced it to return to weekly status. The Hobbs News held doggedly to life as a weekly during the sag in the Hobbs economy after 1930, and on May 1, 1936 resumed publication as a daily morning newspaper. The Hobbs Daily News became a companion newspaper to The Hobbs Daily Sun (founded July 27, 1936), and on March 27, 1937 both were combined into the present Hobbs Daily News-Sun.

Although the Hobbs towns of mid-1930 rose from the Llano much in the manner that workmen would erect a set for a town in a western movie, some permanent structures came on the scene. The all-brick Harden Hotel, for instance, got under way June 5 of that year and when completed was a show-place of its day. A little further north at 206 Carlsbad Street in Hobbs, the Thompson Hardware Store was completed, becoming the first brick structure on that thoroughfare. Down Carlsbad Street, from Shipp Street to Dal Paso, were wooden sidewalks and on either side hardly any vacant spaces still existed. Business homes, mostly wooden with high false fronts, offered a wide array of services and goods.

Two of the Carlsbad Street establishments which achieved some renown for that day were The Model, a store that specialized in fine men's fashions, and just across the street the Oil King Cafe, opened May 19, 1930 by R. B. Beckler (nicknamed Oil King Blackie) and Leonard Kilburn. Located at what is today 123 West Broadway, this was one of the largest eating places in the area and attracted lease speculators, oilfield workers and was a favorite with the towns' policemen. Among other places to dine were Frenchys, advertised as being "clean," and the New Hobbs Cafe where lunch, featuring hot biscuits every day, could be had for 25 cents. Elsewhere prices were equally low: Choice meats were 15 cents per pound, a Simmons day bed was $10 and a new Ford sold for $500.

By night, a great deal of activity shifted to Dunnam Street where many of the speakeasies, dance halls, nightclubs and houses of ill-repute were clustered waiting for the oilfield worker's easy money. It was accepted that some men, fresh in from the fields after a week of labor, would squander their entire earnings here, then return to work to accumulate enough money to do the same thing all over again.

As the year narrowed down, work continued in both Hobbs and New Hobbs to improve municipal and utility services for the residents. The New Hobbs Reporter of August 21 exulted that in New Hobbs Lea-Mex Development Company had given assurances that natural gas for domestic and power uses would be available to the municipality shortly from Phillips Petroleum Company's new plant two miles west of the town, and "its output will be so great in volume and so well treated that this city may expect an ideal supply through the system of Lea-Mex. The Hobbs Daily News of October 16 reported the impending movement of the city hall and police station from a building on Turner Street to Taylor Street at the rear of the Chamber of Commerce Building:

By moving to the new location on Taylor street, just west of Shipp Street, the city will have an office of its own and will be able to operate more efficiently without causing discomfort to the lawyers in the building on Turner Street. 

Top of the Page - The Many Towns of Hobbs -  James Berry Hobbs -  Boom Collapse and Recovery -  Hobbs: Oasis on the Llano -  Bibliography

Boom Collapse and Recovery

As 1930 came to an end, the tide of humanity that had washed over the Llano depositing a clutch of towns, suddenly reversed itself and began moving in the opposite direction. Carried with it were thousands of people and occasionally the thrown-together houses they had lived in. They simply loaded the structure, if small enough, on the bed of a truck and drove away. Some of the larger frame buildings were placed on wheels and towed down the caliche roads, dropping nails as they went. Automobiles and trucks that followed these routes later had frequent flat tires caused by the bed of nails left in the wake of extensive house moving, Residents who remained in the Hobbs towns had to be on a sharp lookout to make certain their own dwellings were not jacked up by some retreating ruffian and taken away as part of his baggage train.

Prompting the exodus from Hobbs was the decline in oil prices, finally struck by the depression that was undermining the national economy. As January 1931 was ushered in the price of crude at Hobbs had dropped from $1.05 a barrel to 50 cents; and the downward spiral continued: In March, 40 cents a barrel; in April, 371/2 cents; in June, 25 cents and, finally in July the rock-bottom price of 10 cents per barrel. Some of the individuals who left the area where the drilling rigs stood silent, scattered with the four winds to make out as best they could. Still many others rode the great distances to new East Texas oil booms at Kilgore and Longview.

When the retreating stampede of humanity finally disappeared in the clouds of dust, Hobbs' towns were sadder and soberer places. Some residents who remained to share the hard and bitter times say the business district resembled a ghost town with weeds thrusting up through the board walks and reconquering the spaces where buildings had been removed. One-fourth of the structures left were deserted; however, Hobbs was not a ghost town of about 500 inhabitants as incorrectly described by some later historians. A census taken Oct. 14, 1931 in Hobbs showed 1,210 residents, and this did not include those living in New Hobbs and All Hobbs. Dr. J. L. Burke, one town pioneer who did not make an exit, estimates the total population between 2,500 and 3,000 when the boom collapse had done its worst to the area. One indicator of a sizable number of people remaining-more than were living in Lovington at the time-were the number of teachers. When school opened in the fall of 1931, 27 were required by the classrooms of the school systems.

Telltale signs of the economic difficulties were everywhere in the months that followed. The State Bank of Hobbs was doomed and to save itself, merged on July 8, 1931 with Lea County State Bank of Lovington. (Two years later, in 1933, a branch of the Lovington operation was opened in Hobbs at Shipp and Broadway. It was not until April 5, 1938, that the institution's name was shortened to Lea County State Bank and that year its headquarters operation was moved to Hobbs. With a name change on July 30,1959, it became New Mexico Bank & Trust Company.)

In spite of the economic doldrums, Hobbs was given town status on Nov. 19, 1931, but the city clerk heard the gloomy news that her salary would be cut from $100 a month to $50. The following February J. F. Maddox of the electric utility company was asked by the town board of aldermen to reduce electrical rates, and when rates of the Hobbs Gas Company were also challenged, Roy Moyston agreed to reduce them five per cent; and as 1932 moved forward, the city practiced even greater economies by naming Clifford Lasley to the post of both police and fire chief with a monthly salary of $50. In August, the town government ordered the Hobbs Gas Company to reduce fire plug rates from $5 to $1 per month.

Hobbs was down, but not out during the early 1930s. Without the frenzied activity in the oilfields, the pace of life slackened, residents made the most of what was available to them. So suspended was the animation of things during this era that even the mayor found few duties that demanded great dispatch. One such was Mayor L. W. Gay who became widely known as the "rocking chair mayor." Gay was elected April 9, 1934, defeating Dantzler L. Bodie by a vote of 416 to 238. His honor, a very corpulent man, owned a grocery store on Carlsbad Street, and residents of that day recall that he so disliked moving about that he spent most of his time in a solidly-built rocking chair. When customers came in the store to make a purchase, the resting mayor would indicate the location of the item on the shelf and allow the individual to serve himself. Gay's large cat, following the attitude of his master, spent much of its time basking and dozing in the sun-filled store window. Strangers coming to Hobbs and asking how to find the mayor were told to go down the street to the "grocery with the cat in the window."

The lull did not last long. In 1934, renewed interest in oil at Hobbs led to a new spurt of drilling activity which would begin moving the area on its way to lasting prosperity and the formation of a city. As the local economy began to recover, the population showed slow but steady growth. The census of May 20, 1935 enumerated 2,995 people living in Hobbs, again excluding the residents of New Hobbs and All Hobbs. By this time, the town had lost much of its rowdiness and the night places that appealed to baser instincts. Contributing factors to the change in conduct and attitude were several. A new type of individual, educated and trained in new oil exploration technology, was coming into the community, and national Prohibition had been repealed making legal the sale of liquor, 8 while placing it under strict local and state controls.

In the next two years a steady stream of new residents came to Hobbs with accelerated oil exploration and discovery, and by early in 1937, a vast majority of residents and the community leadership could discern the futility of continuing the town divisions. New Hobbs' Board of Trustees, led by Mayor James M. Murray Jr., acted on April 5, 1937 to take the first step in the direction of consolidation of town governments. This body adopted a resolution in which a committee of three trustees was appointed to meet with a counterpart group from Hobbs to discuss bringing the towns together under one government. After Hobbs' board took similar action the joint committee met April 12, 19V. It included from New Hobbs, Mayor Murray and Trustees F. C. Ward and W. F. Edwards; from Hobbs, Trustees Grady Thompson, C. W. Jobe and John R. Brand. They quickly reached agreement that elections should be called in both towns on the question of unifying under one municipality.

On May 18, 1937, New Hobbs residents voted 226 to 41 in favor of joining their town with Hobbs, while that same day residents north of Marland in Hobbs approved the proposal by a margin of 283 to 20. With these overwhelming election results in hand, Hobbs' Board of Trustees on May 24 adopted an ordinance annexing New Hobbs to the City of Hobbs, and on May 30 the towns became one. Hobbs moved into a modern era on June 8 when Gov. Clyde Tingley issued a proclamation declaring city status for the municipality. Serving on the first city council were, Mayor Ross Walker and councilmen Jimmy Robinett, C. W. Jobe, James M. Murray Jr. and Glenn Bish. Hobbs had moved from a raw frontier community into a modern city on the Llano within slightly less than a decade. Residents on May 8, 1949 approved the present form of municipal government, mayor and city commission, by a vote of 927 to 468.

Such later strides in government would not have been possible had Hobbs not made a remarkable recovery from the ravages of the depression. This economic come-back was not only attributable to the return of crews to the oilfields, but this time they came equipped with better technology for the job at hand. Exploration at greater depths and development of equipment that could drill to nearly 3 miles below the earth's surface made possible the exploitation of ever richer oil-bearing strata. As a result of both new oilfield activity and new drilling methods, Hobbs' growth from 1934 was steady. An unofficial count in 1936, just two years later, gave the city 8,000 residents. Presumably this included all of the areas contiguous to Hobbs.

Hobbs in this year and for the remainder of the decade was called the fastest growing city in the United States and may have well deserved this reputation. The official head-count of 1940 showed 10,641 residents, while city and state officials were counting about 14,000 people in the municipality.

An El Paso Times reporter spent a great deal of time in the city in October of 1936 and filed this observation about the city's revival:

While other cities on the Lea Llano endured a sluggish growth rate during the late 1930s and until after the end of World War II, Hobbs was becoming a zestful trade center and increasingly the place where oil companies and oil well supply houses were locating; thus by the end of 1939 some impressive advances had been placed in the plus column of the city's expansion.

Records show that 21 new business houses had applied for construction permits, while numbered among the industries were 11 equipment companies, four dealing with drilling clay and acidizing, and a host of others devoted to housing construction, trucking and rig building. Also new on the scene were: Hobbs City Hall (still in use today but greatly expanded), completed in 1939 at North Turner and Cain Streets at a cost of $65,000, part of which was financed by a PWA matching grant of $35,000; a $7,500 city library, using PWA funds, opened in 1938; the first Hobbs Country Club, valued at $38,000, and completed in February 1938; and a new $175,000 sewer plant, completed in October 1938 to serve 186 city blocks.

The resurgence of a viable economy also was reflected in the Hobbs School System, which in 1939 had 2,000 elementary and junior high school students, 500 enrolled in Hobbs High School and a total faculty of 61 teachers. To serve this size educational program, the city had constructed a new elementary school costing $140,000, a junior high school at a cost of $93,000 and an $87,000 high school (now Houston Junior High School) in 1938 and 1939. The new high school gymnasium, valued at $27,000, was also being completed in 1939. To finance the school, library and city hall construction program, Hobbs received six PWA grants totaling $413,924.

In 1939 and 1940, Hobbs completed 150 city blocks of paving. With this the WPA constructed accompanying street drainage, sidewalks and curbs. Better transportation also was assured by the completion of hard surface paving on U. S. Highway 180 between Carlsbad and Hobbs.

Hobbs was benefiting widely from the activity in the Lea County oilfields where there were now 18 pools under more than 54,000 acres of land. The gross value of Lea County oil and gas produced in 1938, alone, was $35.3 million which was about 93 per cent of the total produced in all of New Mexico.

Few cities in the United States had ever evolved so far in hardly more than a decade. Hobbs, despite boom and collapse in its economy, had grown from what was virtually a wilderness spot to a modern American municipality, while overcoming the disadvantages of a fractured local government system in the early years of its existence.

Any history of Hobbs' first fabulous decade as a city would be incomplete Without some mention of the bountiful communications that existed in the form of newspapers. Including those already discussed, there were starts and stops in more than 20 publishing ventures. This is a fairly complete list of those not covered earlier in this chapter: The American, weekly, published only in 1932; The Daily Bulletin, also known as Shatzel's Bulletin, from June 1933 to March 23, 1935; The Hobbs Daily American, appearing briefly in 1939; Hobbs Daily Bulletin, from 1938 to 1940; The Hobbs Morning Post [And Lea County Courier], from May 5, 1938 to April 13, 1940; The Hobbs Press, appeared only in 1935; The Tumbleweed, appearing between March 1935 and June 26, 1942.

Several newspapers were founded in the 1940s. A publication known as the Hobbs Defender came to life in June 1941 as a monthly, but seems not to have survived the first edition; The Hobbs Morning Bulletin existed as a daily briefly it, 1941 and then folded; and The Hobbs Flare became the last new publication to make an appearance-first as a weekly from March 26, 1948 to June 18, 1949, and then on a daily basis until July 24, 1951, when it returned to weekly status. it remains in print at present.

Before the 1930s ended another form of communication made its debut in Hobbs. This was Radio Station KWEW which began broadcasting on Aug. 8, 1938. Radio Station KHOB opened in 1954, adding a companion FM broadcast facility, KSCR (first named KLDG) in 1965. In July 1971 Radio Station KCIA, emanating from Humble City, became the third voice on the airways, and in March 1975 it also developed a companion station, KPOE FM.

After being consolidated into one city in 1937, Hobbs did not remain the only government entity in the area for very long. A completely new city, peopled with 5,000 residents, served by their own newspaper, post office, shops and theater, suddenly grew from the Llano and on Hobbs' doorstep. This was Hobbs Army Air Field, which began building on May 1, 1942, when the first detachment of the U. S. Corps of Army Engineers set up their advance post and went to work on rangeland just seven miles north of the city and adjacent to State Road 18.

Creating a military base here to train fighting men for the World War II combat areas in Europe and Southeast Asia was inspired by Col. John G. Armstrong, at that time director of training for Roswell's Army air field. He visited Hobbs early in 1942 and recommended the area to the Army as the location for a training base because the surrounding country offered "perpetual flying weather."

The Army, with its machines and construction expertise, soon found carving out a place of human habitation and work from the Llano was every bit as formidable as it had been in the days of the pioneers. Once down past the thin covering of topsoil, digging tools struck the hard layer of caliche rock, so the military builders resorted to explosives and heavy power equipment to dig foundations, cut ditches for utility lines and build the asphalt-topped runways of the base. Later, some of the rock was used for decoration along walk-ways and lawns. When completed the Army base's appearance must have been pleasing as indicated in this news story which appeared in the Hobbs Daily News-Sun of the period:

The Army men also discovered some striking similarities between their at first unfinished military installation and that of an early pioneer town with unpaved streets. The prairie mud, the consistency of melted chocolate, clung to the feet of the troops on their way to the flying line, and every-day existence was generally dirty and dusty until the base roads were paved. Actually, the first contingent of men arrived for training while construction was still in progress, and this was the scene that greeted them: Latrines were still to be built, water faucets and showers gave forth only cold water and the streets were only paths on the cattle range.

Under its first commander, Col. Milton M. Murphy, Hobbs Army Air Field was given the mission of training bombardier cadets; however, in October 1942 it was designated as the Army's first four-engine pilot transition school. This meant that the base took pilots who had received their wings and commissions and trained them to command the four-engine Flying Fortress (B-17). This school was their last step before being trained at still another base as part of a crew which would fly the huge aircraft when it arrived for service in a combat area. The base also trained personnel in operation of the B-24 Liberator Bomber.

As the air field grew in scope and size, basic training also was offered for enlisted men before they took on the base's tougher schooling in how to repair and maintain fighting aircraft, and the area was filled with platoons of marching men learning the fundamentals of Army life. These troops were assigned to the 387th Base Headquarters and Air Base Squadron. In addition to the ground school, or training in aviation mechanics, the base developed a Bomber Pilot Approach School in which each Flying Fortress pilot received the basics in dropping bombs on what The Hobbs News-Sun, at that time, depicted as "Nazi-enslaved Europe or Jap-held South Pacific islands." A detachment of Air WACS was added to the military base on June 16, 1943, and all of the air field's schools and operations were placed under one command, the 3017th AAF Base Unit (Pilot School Specialized Four-Engine) in 1944.

Reaching the height of its development, Hobbs Army Air Field published a newspaper, The Bomb Blast, and offered such facilities as officers' and enlisted men's clubs, a post exchange, general store, restaurant, soda fountain, an eightlane bowling alley, field gymnasium, motion picture theater and two swimming pools.

Having served its purpose, the air base was deactivated in 1946. Hobbs officials made an attempt to keep the field operating and even financed a study to impress military officials in Washington and persuade them of the base's importance to the national defense picture. Instead Clovis won with its bid to keep what is now Cannon Air Force Base operating, and the Hobbsans' effort came to naught. Not since Col. William Rufus Shafter's Buffalo Soldiers had military men served on the Llano, and now the soldiers were gone again-perhaps forever.

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Hobbs:  Oasis on the Llano

As World War 11 receded, Hobbs continued to move toward becoming an industrial, commercial and educational center on the Llano Estacado. Endeavor in these three fields would see the city evolve into Lea County's largest metropolitan area with a population of about 34,000 by 1976, the Bicentennial year of the nation's founding.

Even with the closing of Hobbs Army Air Field something of value accrued to the city. This was the 2,800 acres which the base had covered and a portion of the facilities, including the runways, which remained on the land. On Dec. 23, 1948, the city of Hobbs acquired the property for $2,283, and has since designated it as Hobbs Industrial Air Park, providing sites for new industries and recreation which requires more than the normal amount of space.

Before the 1940s ended, Hobbs saw established its second bank, the First National Bank of Lea County, which opened in May 1949 with capital of $150,000. Instrumental in organizing the new bank were W.H. (Bill) Bailey, who became vice president and secretary of the board of directors: Chairman A. C. Kimbrough and other members, Dr. C. S. Stone, Carl Landrum (the first president), B. H. Nolen and George Mansur. Originally located at 406 North Turner, the bank opened a branch on April 1, 1972 in Lovington. The city's third bank, Liberty National Bank, is a branch of the main bank in Lovington and was opened in 1971. Together with New Mexico Bank & Trust Company, the three institutions this year had deposits of more than $163 million and assets of more than $183 million.

Since the beginning of the 1950s decade, schools and education in Hobbs have realized more rapid advances than in any other part of New Mexico. These have been made in the realms of both public and private education.

Today's modern high school complex, located on a 45-acre campus, was begun in 1952 with the first segment of construction financed by a $1.5 million school bond issue. Augmented over the years, the complex now includes a Ralph Tasker Arena (gymnasium) and Nelson Tydings Auditorium, the two largest such facilities in the state, and Watson Memorial Stadium. From a portion of a $2,8 million bond issue approved by voters in May 1975, the complex will be further enhanced with an indoor swimming pool, girls' gymnasium and a field house to serve the stadium. Presently Hobbs High School provides educational facilities for more than 1,575 students.

The Hobbs School System has grown to include three junior high schools, Highland, Houston and Heizer, and 10 elementary schools. The total system includes 6,944 students and 396 teachers, and is operating on a current budget of $13,028,947. Investment in the Hobbs educational facilities amounts to more than $27.5 million in buildings, and more than $31 million in equipment.

While the public schools were being shaped to fit the needs of a modern city, the need for higher education was not ignored. The first institution of higher learning, the College of the Southwest, was founded in August 1956 by B. Clarence Evans and several associates. They named it Hobbs Baptist College, a school offering a 4-year curriculum and a liberal arts degree. The school was granted its charter on August 15, 1956 by the New Mexico Secretary of State. The college was re-chartered on March 3, 1958 as New Mexico Baptist College, and again on Feb. 9, 1962, changing the name to College of the Southwest. Now an independent college, the institution has an enrollment of about 150 students. Its facilities were expanded in October 1976 with the dedication of the $473,000 Mabee Southwest Heritage Center, which provides an auditorium and work rooms for a variety of activities ranging from the performing arts and lectures to seminars and study groups.

Establishing New Mexico Junior College, the only institution of its type in the state, required nearly six years of community and legislative effort beginning in 1960. After enabling measures for the junior college were approved in 1963, a steering committee was formed to begin work on creation of the school in Lea County. In a referendum on Oct. 28, 1964, Jal was the only school district of the county's five to defeat the proposal, thus the junior college district was redrawn and a second and successful referendum was held Jan. 20, 1965.

Named to serve on the first New Mexico Junior College Board were Finn Watson and George Mansur of Hobbs, F. L. Heidel of Lovingon, Ferrel D. Caster of Tatum and R. L. McLean of Eunice. The four communities are the main support areas of the NMJC district which finances the school's operation through a 4mill levy in taxation. The board selected Dr. H. C. Pannell as the first junior college president, who began duties July 1, 1965 in temporary offices on East Taylor Street in Hobbs.

Construction of the college campus facilities began Feb. 15, 1966, and fall enrollment that year was 728 students. Since development of NMJC started on the 234-acre campus, taken from the Hobbs Industrial Air Park, the institution has grown to encompass 12 buildings and a rodeo arena, with a total value of $10 million. Average enrollment is 1,100 degree students and 4,000 attending special classes in the junior college's continuing education series.

In the manner of most early pioneer settlements the Hobbs community of frontier days had church services, both union and denominational in the school house; but today 58 churches representing 19 denominations, many of them sponsoring Spanish-speaking missions, are available in the city, or are located near the city limits.

Hospital care is offered by the privately owned, $7 million Llano Estacado Medical Center, which was opened in June 1974 on Hobbs Industrial Air Park land north of the city. Until that time the Hobbs hospital was a $1.3 million unit of the Lea County General Hospital System. The Hobbs unit began in 1947 when a $750,000 bond issue was approved for its construction. Subsequently additions were made in 1959 and during the 1960s. The unit was closed when the medical center was activated.

Hobbs city government in 1976 is itself big business. The municipality is administered from a complex that covers most of a city block and includes the original city hall constructed in the late 1930s. There are 263 city employees, counting the 66 members of the Hobbs Police Department. The cost of operating this government for the fiscal year 1976-1977 is $5,796,650. The budget has multiplied many times since the city clerk was paid $100 per month in 1930, or when the Hobbs budget was $55,480 for the 1938-1939 fiscal year. Services offered residents have expanded most rapidly during the 1970s, and are being planned for during the remainder of the century. Currently the city is beginning construction of a $5 million sewer plant and is conducting studies to determine water and sewer requirements when Hobbs reaches a projected population of 50,000 in 1995.

The city government also operates a wide range of recreational and educational services ranging from parks and swimming pools to arts and crafts classes in Will Rogers Community Center and the city library with more than 58,000 volumes. The library was opened April 1, 1969 in Clinton Park at a cost of $298,000.

Hobbs in many ways is still a boomtown, riding on the production of energy and also in more recent years, the creation of a trade center that reaches an estimated 85,000 consumers within a 75-mile radius of the city. Seldom now do residents leave the Llano to shop in distant places. By a wide margin the trend is reversed, with shoppers gravitating toward Hobbs from rural areas and towns in both West Texas and New Mexico. Main areas of trade in the city are: The downtown, maintained by continuing renovation, and five major shopping centers. In 1975 Hobbs' 1,086 businesses recorded sales valued at $199,818,108.

In 48 years, Hobbs has moved from a rural community on the wilderness Llano to occupy the status of a fully modern American city. For the majority of cities of equal size this feat has been accomplished only after a century or more of existence on the average.

New Mexico historian Erna Fergusson visited the city once in its young oil days in the 1930s. What she found apparently appalled her and clouded any vision she might have had about the city's future. She could not picture a Hobbs in the mainstream of modern American civilization, a city with quiet streets, sedate homes and cultural values. The historian penned this harsh description of the city, one of many that Hobbs has been and one that long ago vanished:

Top of the Page - The Many Towns of Hobbs -  James Berry Hobbs -  Boom Collapse and Recovery -  Hobbs: Oasis on the Llano -  Bibliography

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

(Bibliography)

1. Erna Fergusson, Our Southwest, New York, A. A. Knopf, 1940.
2. T. M. Pearce, New Mexico Place Names-A Geographical Dictionary, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1965.
3. Pearce S. Grove, Becky J. Barnett and Sandra J. Hansen, New Mexico Newspapers-A Comprehensive Guide To Bibliographical Entries and Locations, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press in Cooperation with Eastern New Mexico University, 1975.
4. Samuel D. Myres, The Permian Basin-Petroleum Empire of the Southwest, El Paso, Permian Press, 1973.
5. The History of Hobbs, Hobbs Chamber of Commerce, 1972.
6. History of the First Baptist Church, Hobbs, New Mexico, 1915-1963.
7. New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fe, April 1973.
8. New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fe, April 1969.
9. New Mexico Highway Journal, Santa Fe, December 1930.
10. Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe, July 23, 1930.
11. El Paso-Herald Post, El Paso, Nov. 6, 1939.
12. El Paso Times, El Paso: Oct. 14, 1936; Nov. 8, 1936.
13. The Hobbs Daily News-Sun: Sept. 31, 1936; May 11, 1939; Special Wartime Edition, 1944; Dec. 31, 1944; Sept. 28, 1951; Oct. 28, 1951; Oct. 29, 1951; Feb. 1, 1956; July 1, 1962; Aug. 1, 1962; Sept. 21, 1967; Jan. 27, 1975; June 2, 1976.
14. The Hobbs Times-Herald: May 16,1930; May 23, 1930; May 27, 1930; May 28,1930; May 30,1930.
15. The Hobbs Reporter: May 15, 1930; May 29, 1930; June 5, 1930; Aug. 21, 1930; Oct. 11, 1930; Nov. 13, 1930.
16. The Hobbs Daily News: Aug. 31, 1930; Sept. 2, 1930; Sept. 11, 1930; Sept. 16, 1930; Jan. 25, 1931.
17. The Hobbs News, June 13, 1936.
18. The Lovington Leader: June 4, 1920; July 30, 1920; Oct. 10, 1920; Nov. 3, 1920; Nov. 15, 1920; Dec. 3, 1920; June 1, 1928; July 6, 1928; Feb. 28, 1929; March 1929; Sept. 2, 1929; Oct. 4, 1929; Oct. 29, 1929; June 1, 1938; Oct. 9, 1958.
19. Development Program, College of the Southwest.
20. Business -Industry -Education Day, Hobbs Gas Co., Aug. 28, 1957.
21. New Mexico Secretary of State: Copies of minutes and resolutions of the towns of Hobbs and New Hobbs.
22. New Mexico Junior College: Public relations office material.
23. Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico: Postmasters -Hobbs and Knowles, N. M., 1903-1915.
24. Berry Lee Hobbs of Lovington: Conversation with the author.
25. Minnie Hobbs Byers of Lovington: Conversation with the author.
26. J. L. Burke of Hobbs: Conversation with the author.
27. Mettie Jordan of Hobbs: Conversation with the author.
28. Walter Linam of Hobbs: Conversation with the author.
29. Mrs. Will Terry of Hobbs: Conversation with the author.
30. City of Hobbs: Information supplied the author.

Footnotes:

1 Verified by Mettie Jordan of Hobbs who was principal at this school in 1929-1930. Some later historians have erred in placing the rural school's location at what is today 211 South Second Street.  Back to the text

2  Berry Lee Hobbs of Lovington, a son of James Berry Hobbs, has confirmed that his father's objective in establishing a post office was to improve the business of the rural store.  Back to the text

3  Nine acres of land at the northwest corner of present Dal Paso and Marland were not included in the Hobbs Townsite Company holdings. This was part of the Berry Hobbs homestead and was later platted as the Berry Hobbs Addition.  Back to the text

4  The post office in New Hobbs was moved to Hobbs in 1930, according to Dr. J. L. Burke. This was the original post office, founded by Berry Hobbs and eventually located in the E. H. Byers home in All Hobbs. Burke contends that a truck picked up the post office facility and literally moved it to the area encompassing the Hobbs Townsite Company north of Marland Boulevard. Records show that New Hobbs did have its own postal facility from 1930 to 1932. The towns* names were somewhat misleading. Actually the original post office was located in 1929 in the area that became New Hobbs. The town north of Marland was new and rightfully should have been named New Hobbs, instead of Hobbs, or Old Hobbs, as it was sometimes called. The town of Hobbs contained none of the pioneer facilities-the store or post office-through which it could claim the name of Hobbs. By the same token, the town south of Marland had no reason to be called "New".  Back to the text

5  How far the rivalry was carried is illustrated by this story. New Hobbs had the only post office facility for a brief time. Between the two towns were several low places [one where the Holiday Inn is located now] that filled with water during rainy spells. Little boys sent to the post office by parents living in Hobbs would taunt New Hobbs children with these sing-song lines: "Yanh, yanh, you live in Frogtown-just a hop, skip and jump from the Post Office. "  Back to the text

6  Some of these establishments tried to outdo the others with the gaudy and the sensational. One of them announced it would auction a live baby and on the appointed date proceeded to make good on the promise. It offered for auction a live baby alligator.  Back to the text

7  The first Hobbs Chamber of Commerce on July 16, 1930 listed these firms as members and, therefore, doing business in the town:  Atlas Supply Co., J. W. Allen Hardware, ABC Battery Service, American Steam Laundry, Anderson & Hacksinsmith Bakery, Acme Lumber Co., Auction Store [Furniture], Anthony & Storey Market, Amerado Petroleum Co., Black-Sivalls-Bryson [Tanks], Bills Battery Service Station, Bagley Lumber Company, Bock & Thomas Transfer Co., Breco Drug Co., Bryan Bros. Groceries, Brennon-McGranahn Hardware, C. B. Berry Grocery, Bill Wolfords Grocery & Market, Baltimore Drug Co., Beatty Steam Laundry, Bandy-Dunn Feed & Produce, Bakers Blacksmith Shop, Bullington Garner Tank Co., M. H. Bridges [Lea County Service], Continental Supply Co.; Crawford Boiler Works Co., Craig & Son Lumber, Childress & Pick Construction, Cains Baker Shop, Crows & Co. Cafe, Cleves Pool Hall, Crosby & Ammons Cafe, Corner Service Station, Jack Coleman Clothiers, Club Cafe [Tidwell & Sandlin], Pete Cooles Building Materials, Clay & Powder Co. of El Paso, William Cameron Lumber Co., Clay Lumber Co., Cities Service Co., Chevrolet Agency, Kirk Cornell of Republic Supply, Christian & Culbreith's Wichita Coffee Shop, Don Robinson Generators, Dixie Store Ready to Wear, Dal Paso Hotel, Drane Humphrey Co., Dixie Lunch Room, Dodd Dads Grocery, Day Drug Co., Dunigans Tool & Supply Co., M. J. Delaney's International Supply, Rom M. Davis Texas Boiler Works, Emsco Derrick Equipment Co., Electric Shop Regulation Lighter, Electric Shoe Shop, Enterprise Market & Grocery, El Paso Clay & Powder Co., Ellis Tank Co., Eastland Oil Co. [Hercules Supply Co.], Robert A. Estes [Lawyer]; Fowser Boiler Works, Frency's Cafe, Famous Clothiers, Red Frick Supply Corp., Gurley Agency, Golden Transportation, Gray Grocery-Lumber Co., Getty Petroleum Corp., George F. Getty Petroleum Corp., Hobbs Auto Glass & Top Co., Hobbs Tailoring Co., Hobbs Welding & Iron Works, Hobbs Ice Co., W. S. Hiler Jobber, Henry Bagley Lumber Co., Hall Electric Works, Hays Market & Restaurant, Hobbs Townsite Co., Highway Garage, Hills Variety Store, Hobbs Laundry, Hoffmans Ready To Wear, Hobbs Mattress Factory, Higginbotham Bartlett Lumber Co., Hobbs Times Herald, Hobbs Cabinet Shop, Hinderlter Tool Co., Humble Oil Co., Humble Pipe Line, Hall Molding Works, Hub Clothing; Harris Lumber Co., International Supply Co., International Derrick Equipment Co., Imperial Boiler Works, Ira N. Ellis Tank Co., Jackson Service Station, J. W. Allen Hardware Furniture Co., Jal Hardware & Furniture Co., Jack Colemans, Johnson & Hatch Sand & Gravel, M. B. Jones Drug Store, Kirk Morrow Iron Works, Keith & Hort-Man Furniture, Keiser Transportation Co., Kilburn & Beckler's Oil King Cafe, R. E. Kinsey of McGalthen Hotel [New Hobbs], E. M. Karnegay's Milts Barber Shop, Kurtz & Karlan [The Toggery], The Leader Store Clothiers, Lea County Baking, Lee C. Moore Co. Derricks, Lippmans Clothiers, Lea County Hardware Service, Longhart Supply Co., McKinley Chevrolet Co., Lee Moore Co., McDuffys, Model Clothiers, Mayflower Drug, McKees Cafe; Morse Barber Shop, Model Food Store, Maloney Tank Co., Murray Tool & Supply Co., Moorhead & Harrington Drug Store, Turner McCullogh Star Drug Store, Monhollon & Harris West Side Grocery, Tom Moore Lumber Co., M & M Lumber Co., M System Groceries Market, National Supply Co., National Cleaners, New Hobbs Lumber Co., Oil Well Supplies Co., Oil Well Supply Co., Ohio Oil Co., Oil King Cafe, Ostron Market & Grocery, Republica Supply Co., Randolph Bakery Co., Don Roberson Generator Shop, Rex Billiard Hall, Roach & Alsup, Ritz Theater, Ritz Pharmacy, H. Robinson Sandrough Cafe, Shell Petroleum Co., Stahlman Lumber Co., Staples & Fowzer Machine Co.; Silver Moon Cafe, Harvey P. Shead [Attorney], Southwestern Investment Co., Sheldon & Bruden, Star Drug Store, Star Garage, C. L. Singleton Drugs, Sourdough Cafe, Smith Separator Co., State Telephone Co., The Model Clothiers, Turner Service Station, Terrell Drug Store, M. E. Tomson Grocery, Tyrone Barber Shop, The National Clothing Store, Thompson Hardware Co., Dr. Allen P. Terrell Day Drug Store, H. W. Thompson Grocer, Texas Spring Works, Union Hospital, P. J. Woolridge Lumber, T, G. White, Westex Supply Co., T. E. Wright Clothing, Walkers Cafe, Walkers & Jennings Ealkers Cafe, West Side Grocery, Wheeler & Burns, and Yarborugh Service Station.  Back to the text

8  Legalization of liquor sales in 1934 brought a flood of 14 applications for dispensers* licenses to city hall. Making application were: Former Mayor Roy Yarbrough, Harry Burnett, Sam Stewart for Palace Drug, Tex Riley, J. L. Fields, Taylor and Carter for Mint Cafe, A. Caylor for Pig and Whitle Cafe, Frank Caparoni, Mecca Cafe, J. L. Fields, Payton and Carter, Elson and Burnett, Midwest Drug, Coney Island Lunch and Hobbs Drug, owned J. W. Montsenbacker.  Back to the text

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