Higgins, Texas . . .

. . . is like a thousand other skeletons that haunt the High Plains, a mummy wrapped in sand sage and little bluestem grass and buried amongst thickets of Chickasaw plum. Rusted and spindly relics of old water towers rise above a tomb of streets inscribed with Founders’ names. The term ‘once thriving’ is conspicuously absent from the town limit sign where the cracked and tarred blacktop comes in from Oklahoma, the same sign whose population figures are certainly of questionable accuracy.

---

The trains don’t stop here anymore, and haven’t for quite some time, and unless Aunt Hortense was trackside at 2:33 am furiously waving down Number 2, the Warbonnet PAs never stopped and never missed a four-stroke beat as they rolled the crack San Francisco Chief through town at track speed. The mixed trains with their mineral brown cabbages quit calling and the agencies closed years ago, and if there is still any grain left in the dilapidated elevators and corrugated storage bins, it has long since fermented.

There are no stock cars on the current corporate roster, and no corrals to load them at, but when G.H Higgins held stock in the Santa Fe Railroad there were plenty of both. Will Rogers cowboyed here in the last few years of the 19^th century and surely drove beeves to the railhead and off to market.

But today’s 24-hour-a-day double-track speedway that is the Transcon doesn’t slow down for tiny Higgins, Texas.

The scourge of time has left its calling card, and the high winds have assisted. Those same winds scoured the Plains in the 1930s, lifting not only the dust into thin air, but opportunity as well. Fortunes came and went on the whims of the weather, and the twister of ‘47 almost removed Higgins from existence.

Oil came in the ‘50s. It scraped off the land, drilled wells and laid pipelines and sent royalty checks to zip code 79046.

But the youth, in all the restlessness that progress tends to bring, shunned the ranches and farms of their forefathers and followed the four winds to the big cities and to the coasts where they could buy their beef and corn in a supermarket without the worries of on-the-hoof prices at the auction barn or January bushel futures. They left and never went back.

Higgins is but a tiny dot somewhere between Lost and Forsaken. . .

And any life that remained—the edge-of-town truck stops, the City Markets, the Phillips 66s, the roadside cafes with their Coca-Cola signs, chicken fried steaks and 32oz Porterhouses, the countless town squares and Bijou Theater marquis—was sucked away by the Interstate System and the airlines.

And, like a whole generation, it hasn’t returned.

The hollowed-out shells of Chevrolet dealers are left decaying. The view through the huge dust-covered showroom windows now looks out onto mostly empty Main Streets, where rusted Massey Fergusons and ancient stake-bed GMCs are now revered décor, and strung up with lights and garland for the Holidays.

Like so many other places, Higgins is but a tiny dot plopped down by Rand McNally somewhere between Lost and Forsaken way out on the rolling grassland of the far northeastern Texas Panhandle. It is a town nearly deserted, whose collapsed roofs and broken panes will someday outnumber the human populace, and the stop sign before you turn out onto Highway 60 is almost unnecessary.

Seemingly, Higgins has outlived its usefulness.

Time forgot it, and so did everyone else. Those who are left are weathered, stout and hearty souls wrapped in stoicism; a mirror of those who first settled this land fourteen decades ago.

They are of the land; salt of the earth, possessed of strong opinions and a great knowledge of all things bovine, and generally quite unconcerned that nothing interesting ever happens here.

There isn’t anything in Higgins to write home about.

Rick Malo – Photograph and text Copyright 2022