Sheep rancher following lead of his ancestors

The fertile Lipan Flats east of here were mainly prairie when pioneer farmers started settling their land and clearing the brush in the late 1880s. The first settlers were J.C. and Lou Bell Bunnell in 1886. The town was named for J.M. Wall, a storekeeper who also served as first postmaster when the post office opened in 1906. When George E. Hemphill claimed his 640 acre tract four miles south of Wall, he plowed the land with mules he brought with him from Missouri in 1902. “I can remember my mother telling about Grandpa Hemphill hollering at those stubborn mules,” said John Horace “Took” Edwards. “He finally got rid of the mules and bought draft horses to pull the plow.” Hemphill bought the farm from W.A. and Victoria Pringle. His first crops were oats, cotton and milo. He later bought another 640 acres and added livestock production to the operation. He was one of the first Concho Valley stockfarmers to raise and feed lambs for shipment by rail to Fort Worth as fat choice lambs, Took remembers. Besides sheep and goats, he also got into the purebred Hereford cattle business...read more