I ran across a blog post by Andy Nold, a surveyor, about his research into a large subdivision of land in Reeves County. It provides great incite into the challenges faced by surveyors in West Texas. Here is his post, with permission: Today’s surveying challenge is the garden spot of…
Sent to me by a friend: Edgar Freeman Smith was the youngest child of a circuit preacher. By age eleven he had to work in a coal mine to support his widowed mother. When he was eighteen they lost their home to foreclosure. People told him to learn a trade…
This is my 500th blog post. My first post was on March 23, 2009, the first of three posts about deductibility of post-production costs from royalties. Since then I’ve written about post-production costs twenty-three times. I decided to start this blog as a way to provide information about developments in…
On this day in 1787 Alexander Hamilton, under the pen name “Publius,” published the first of the 85 letters to newspapers later named the Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, to argue for adoption of the U.S. Constitution. We’ve been arguing about it ever since. Hamilton…
Once the largest landowner in Texas with 3.5 million acres of land, Texas Pacific Land Trust now owns 888,333 acres of land in West Texas. The Trust is owned by holders of “shares of proprietary interest” traded on the New York Stock Exchange. TPLT’s story is a window into the…
This was written by the late Joe Edwards, a Jazz pianist from Missouri: World War II Love Story It was a time of Harry James and Betty Grable; a time of seams in the ladies stockings, of Rosie the Riveter, ration stamps for gasoline, shoes, fuel oil, sugar and tires.…
Friday was the anniversary of Black Sunday, in 1935, the worst dust storm in the Dust Bowl days of the Texas Panhandle. The photo below is of Pampa, Texas on that day. My parents were married in 1929, after their high school graduation. They farmed outside Friona, Texas, in the…
I recently read a biography of R.B. Masterson, famous cattleman, written by his son-in-law Z.T. Scott in 1930. Scott listed as Masterson’s first outstanding quality his honesty. “Schooled in the days when a man’s word was his bond and elaborate contracts with legal perplexities were unthought of, his sense of…
Every year, the ABA Journal of the American Bar Association publishes a list of its 100 best blogs related to law topics. One of those on this year’s list is the Texas Agriculture Law Blog, published by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. The author is Tiffany Dowell Lasmet, an…
“Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.” “Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.” “If you ever injected truth into politics you would have no politics.” “The more you read and observe about…