It is a family history written in blood and ink.
Oliver Loving was born in Hopkins County, Kentucky in 1812. He farmed there as a young man. (Photo from Legends of America.)
In the 1840 census he listed his household as one male, age twenty to thirty; two males, under age five; one female, age twenty to thirty; one female, age five to ten.
About 1845 he moved his family to Texas, where he had a land patent in southwest Collin County.
Near the site of today’s Plano he farmed and hauled freight. But the nearest mills for his crops were in Shreveport and Jefferson, two hundred miles away.
So, he turned to raising cattle. According to one source, the money from the sale of a sidesaddle belonging to his wife paid for his first longhorn.
In 1850 his son George Barnet Loving was born. (Baby George does not appear in this 1850 census.)
In 1855 the Lovings moved to Palo Pinto County and settled in Pleasant Valley, which became known as “Loving Valley.” There the Lovings operated a country store and ranched on Keechi Creek.
In 1856 when a new mail route was established between Dallas and Fort Belknap, Oliver Loving was postmaster of Pleasant Valley.
By 1857 Loving grazed a large herd of cattle on one thousand acres of land. The next year he assigned his son Joseph, nineteen, to drive the herd up the Shawnee Trail to market in Illinois. The drive was so successful that Oliver Loving repeated it in 1859.
In 1860 Oliver Loving had five children and eight slaves in Pleasant Valley.
But the valley was not always pleasant. The Telegram later wrote, “Owing to outbreaks among the Comanche Indians, life in that locality was very risky, and the elder Loving finally removed with his family to Weatherford” in Parker County.
By 1862 the Lovings were living in Weatherford in this house, built in 1857.
In 1866 Loving heard that Fort Sumner in New Mexico needed cattle to feed eight thousand Native Americans on a nearby reservation. Loving gathered a herd, combined it with a herd of cattleman and former Texas Ranger Charles Goodnight (photo from Wikipedia), and began the long drive to the fort. Loving and Goodnight sold some of their cattle to the Army for $12,000 ($212,000 today) in gold. Loving then drove the remainder of the herd north to Colorado and sold it. Meanwhile, Goodnight returned to Weatherford with the gold and gathered another herd to drive. Goodnight and Loving reunited in southern New Mexico, where they spent the winter of 1866-1867 and supplied cattle to Santa Fe and Fort Sumner.
In 1867 Goodnight and Loving made three drives along the trail from Texas west to Fort Sumner and north into Colorado, accompanied by tracker and cowboy Bose Ikard. The third drive was slowed by heavy rain and the threat of attack by Native Americans. Despite the risk, Loving left the herd and rode ahead toward Fort Sumner to negotiate sales contracts, taking with him only his scout, one-armed Bill Wilson. Although Loving told Goodnight that he would travel only at night through Native American territory, Loving did not like to travel by night and became impatient. He decided to ride by day, tempting fate. Around two o’clock on the first afternoon about one hundred Comanches attacked Loving and Wilson on the trail. Loving and Wilson left the trail and sought shelter on the Pecos River southeast of Carlsbad.
One newspaper account of the time reported: “After fighting the Indians some time, and being badly wounded, he [Loving] and his companion [Wilson], to save themselves, swam the Pecos, and the Indians, finding they could not kill them by firing from this side, one of their number swam across but was killed by Loving. His companion filled his boots with water, and setting them by Loving, and leaving his brace of pistols with him, at his request, started in pursuit of assistance. Loving swam back to this side, and meeting a Mexican train, paid the wagon master $300 [$5,000 today] to carry him to Sumner. After getting the money, they [wagon train members] proposed killing him to avoid the trouble, but his life was saved by the determination of a boy, and he reached the Fort. Amputation was found necessary which was performed, but one of the arteries having broken loose, a re-amputation became necessary, and he died a few days after.”
As Loving lay dying of gangrene he asked Goodnight to take his body back to Weatherford for burial, to pay off his debts, and to see that his family was cared for.
Loving was buried at Fort Sumner while Goodnight drove the herd on to Colorado. Then Goodnight had Loving’s body exhumed. J. Evetts Haley in his biography of Goodnight writes that Goodnight’s cowboys gathered oil cans, flattened them, soldered them together, and fashioned a tin casket, placing inside it the exhumed wooden casket that contained Loving’s body. By one account Goodnight packed the body in charcoal and returned it by wagon to Weatherford, where Loving was reburied in Greenwood Cemetery on March 4, 1868. Other accounts say the body was accompanied by Bose Ikard or William D. Reynolds (see below) or Loving’s son Joseph, who had made the Lovings’ first cattle drive in 1858.
This marker is in Mentone, county seat of Loving County.
Greenwood Cemetery, Weatherford.
The trail that Goodnight and Loving blazed became known as the “Goodnight-Loving Trail,” stretching seven hundred miles through west Texas into New Mexico and north into Colorado. It became one of the Southwest’s most heavily traveled cattle trails. Oliver Loving is remembered as “the dean of the trail drivers.” (Map from Billington and Ridge, Western Expansion: A History of the American Frontier.)
A cowboy driving his herd on the Goodnight-Loving Trail. (Illustration from Harper’s Weekly, 1867.)
Oliver Loving’s son George Barnet Loving was born on June 10, 1850 in Collin County near the future site of Plano.
George was seventeen years old when Oliver was killed in 1867. Like older brothers Joseph and James, George inherited their father’s ranching gene.
At age nineteen George married Miss Helen Shephard at Weatherford. He began ranching in Parker County, then moved to Denison to buy and ship cattle (he also was hide and cattle inspector).
While in Denison, in part because of the national financial panic of 1873, Loving went bankrupt. The “Bros.” in “George B. Loving & Bros.” probably included James Loving and one or both of two other brothers.
George moved to Fort Worth in 1876—the year the railroad arrived. As in Denison, he bought and sold cattle and served as hide and cattle inspector.
The coming of the railroad transformed Fort Worth, making it a shipping center for cattle.
Loving moved to a ranch in Jack County in 1878 and herded his cattle to Fort Worth for sale and shipment.
When he moved back to Fort Worth in 1880 he was $15,000 ($400,000 today) in debt. He continued to buy and sell cattle, but he also began to use black ink to get himself out of the red.
In 1880 Loving began publishing the Stock Journal for cattle raisers.
In 1881 he published one of the bibles of the industry. His Livestock Manual contained “the name, post office address, ranch location, marks and brands of all the principal stockmen of Western and Northwestern Texas, showing marks and brands on electrotype cuts as they appear on the animal.”
In 1882 he began publishing Wool Grower for sheep raisers.
Also in 1882 Loving founded the Fort Worth Gazette and thus became a general in the newspaper wars that raged in Fort Worth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Gazette’s genealogy:
The Fort Worth Democrat was founded in 1871 as a weekly by Major Khleber Miller Van Zandt and others.
In 1873 B. B. Paddock bought the Democrat and served as editor and publisher. The Democrat became the city’s first daily in July 1876 with arrival of the railroad.
In 1880 W. P. Wilson began publishing the daily Advance.
The Daily Democrat merged with Wilson’s Advance in 1881 to form the Democrat-Advance. Paddock remained as editor.
Meanwhile. the Fort Worth Daily Mail (since at least 1885) in 1894 became the Mail-Telegram, which became the Telegram (see below).
In 1882 George B. Loving bought the Democrat-Advance and merged it with his Livestock Journal to form the Fort Worth Gazette morning daily. Paddock remained as editor. The Gazette would be a success with six thousand subscribers who paid $10 ($300 today) a year.
Meanwhile, Loving’s ink had quickly put him enough in the black that in 1880 he built an eighteen-room mansion at 1502 Summit Avenue, one of the first mansions on Quality Hill. (Photo from University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.)
But Loving did not live in his mansion long. In 1883 he sold the mansion to fellow cattleman capitalist E. B. Harrold and thereafter lived in various houses and hotels in Fort Worth.
By 1885 Loving was publisher and general manager of a newspaper, president of a dairy, proprietor of a refrigeration works, and partner in a land and cattle business.
That year his Gazette reported that a county in far west Texas would be created and named after his father Oliver. Loving County indeed was created in 1887. Today it remains the least populous county in the contiguous United States.
I think that distinction would bring a smile to the chapped lips of an ol’ range rider like Oliver Loving.
Fort Worth’s newspaper wars continued in the 1890s. In 1896 the Gazette was killed in action: The Dallas Morning News bought the Gazette and took over its subscription list, and it ceased publication. Gazette readers read this front-page notice in the Morning News when it suddenly appeared on their porch.
In response, former Gazette employees banded together to begin publishing the Fort Worth Register. Which in 1905 was bought by the Record. Which in 1925 was bought by the Star-Telegram, which had formed in 1909 as a merger of Amon Carter‘s Star (1906) and Telegram.
During the 1890s Loving also published the Daily Mail, which was bought about 1900 by the Telegram. Which merged with the Star in 1909 to become the Star-Telegram.
George Barnet Loving died in 1903.
He in buried in Oakwood Cemetery.
And now the rest of the story:
Mrs. M. M. Barnes was the daughter of E. B. Harrold, who had bought George Loving’s Quality Hill mansion in 1883. She had lived in the mansion since 1883. When she died in 1947 she willed the property to the city to be used as a park. At the time of her death the mansion still contained some of its original furniture.
In 1950 the city announced that the mansion, two-story stable and garage, servant’s quarters, coal house, wash house, greenhouse, and a two-room house would be sold to be moved or dismantled.
The contents of the mansion were sold.
The mansion sold for $2,000 ($22,000 today) to Hearne Wrecking Company, which means the mansion was “parted out” like a ’51 Studebaker in an auto salvage yard. The mansion was cannibalized for its exterior lumber, handcrafted wood paneling, staircases, fireplace mantels, custom tiles, stained glass windows, chandeliers, etc.
And on the Loving property on Summit Avenue at Rio Grande Street the city laid out E. B. Harrold Park. There is more history north and south of the park. In this aerial view, the “Alexan Summit” complex stands where once stood the mansion of cattleman Samuel Burk Burnett. The “Law Office of Jim Zadeh, PC” occupies the home of cattleman and brick baron Lyman Cobb. And “Lone Star Ag Credit” is located where cattleman William David Reynolds’s mansion once stood. His carriage house survives.
(According to the Handbook of Texas, Reynolds as a young cowboy worked for Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, rode on the cattle drive when Loving was killed in 1867, and was a member of the party who brought Loving’s body back to Weatherford for reburial in 1868.)
