Shafter Lake, Texas

01A Town Born of a Salt Lake and a Promoter's Pitch

The settlement began as an idea carried by J.F. Bustin, a local businessman who convinced the real estate firm Pierce and Powers to plat a townsite on the rim of a large alkali playa roughly fifty feet below the surrounding caprock. The lake itself had been noted by U.S. Army officer William R. Shafter in 1875 during frontier campaigns across West Texas with the 24th Infantry, a Buffalo Soldier regiment he commanded against Comanche and Kiowa raiders. Shafter, later nicknamed "Pecos Bill" and remembered for his Medal of Honor and Spanish-American War command, left his name on the playa, and by extension on the town that rose above it.

The community was first called Salt Lake, then rechristened Shafter Lake when Pierce and Powers filed the plat in August 1907. A post office opened the same year under postmaster Bert M. Irwin. Within a few weeks the prairie was a busy village of tents, lumber stacks, and surveyor's stakes.

02The Boom Years, 1907 to 1910

Shafter Lake grew quickly. By 1910 the town reported roughly 500 residents, over fifty new homes, a bank, three churches, a school, a general store, a blacksmith shop, and two hotels. Freight wagons ran regular routes to Lubbock and Midland, hauling in lumber, dry goods, and hopeful settlers.

Much of the promotion fell to James T. Cumley, editor of the Shafter Lake Herald. Cumley's editorials praised the area's soil, the recreational potential of the lake (a hard sell for an alkali playa), and the supposed enthusiasm of every visitor who passed through. He printed thousands of extra copies of the Herald and mailed them across the Midwest, a one-man booster campaign aimed at pulling farmers out of Iowa and Illinois and onto the Llano Estacado.

For a moment it worked. Land sold. Children enrolled in the new school. And in June 1910, the town felt confident enough to stand for election as the permanent county seat of newly organized Andrews County.

03What Happened to Shafter Lake, Texas?

The answer is a single vote. In June 1910, Andrews County held its county seat election, and Shafter Lake lost to the town of Andrews by a narrow margin. Accounts describe the contest as bitter and, in the language of the day, "controversial," though the formal result stood.

In West Texas in 1910, losing a county seat race was often a death sentence. The courthouse meant lawyers, clerks, land records, and the steady foot traffic that kept hotels and general stores solvent. Within eighteen months, Shafter Lake's momentum reversed. By 1912, according to the Handbook of Texas, most of the town's residents had packed up and moved the short distance to Andrews, sometimes hauling their frame houses with them across the flats. The Herald went silent. The bank closed. The hotels emptied.

The playa that had given the town its name offered no fallback. The soil around Shafter Lake is thin and saline, poorly suited to the dryland cotton and sorghum that would later sustain the county, and oil discoveries were still two decades away.

04Can You Visit Shafter Lake Today?

The site sits about four miles west of U.S. Route 385 in north-central Andrews County, near coordinates 32.40 N, 102.67 W, at an elevation of roughly 3,173 feet. The land today is a working ranch, reportedly operated by descendants of the original postmaster's family, so visitors should not expect open access. The lake itself, a broad salt playa, is visible from public roads and fills seasonally after heavy rains.

Andrews, about ten miles east, remains the county seat and offers the nearest services. The drive out through the mesquite and oil pads gives a fair sense of how isolated Shafter Lake felt in 1910, and why a courthouse would have meant everything.

05What Remains of Shafter Lake Today

By 1980 a state historical survey recorded only a dilapidated cemetery at the site. According to the Handbook of Texas, twelve graves and a single original building are all that remain of the town that once printed thousands of newspapers to advertise itself. The playa is unchanged. The Herald's presses are long gone. What survives is a small burying ground on private ranch land, the bones of an ambition that lost an election and never recovered.