HOMESTEAD: Owen Brothers built prosperity

The Owen Brothers Livestock Co. was started on a shoestring budget in 1935 in San Saba County. By 1954 it was one of the largest of its kind in Central Texas. Bill and Kelly Owen started their business right after the Depression. “As far as we were concerned, the Depression was still on,” Bill told the Standard-Times. “Our livestock numbers were so few we could haul them all in a pickup truck and trailer.” “It was a gamble all the way,” Bill Owen told the Standard-Times in 1965. “The banker wouldn’t lend Kelly and me any money, but he did agree to hold our check until our first load of livestock was sold. That ‘cold check’ put us in the cattle and sheep business.” At the time, Bill was operating a stockfarm and Kelley worked for an oil company. Their grandparents, John R. and Elizabeth Favers Owen and William Thomas and Nancy Duncan Linn, were pioneers of San Saba County. The Owen brothers wintered their first lambs on a partnership deal in 1934-35. They first owned 700 head but increased their number of lambs every winter until they hit their peak of 20,000 head in 1945, according to an account in a San Saba County history book written by Martha Burnham, daughter of Bill Owen. “They would buy and sell for other ranchers, sometimes handling as many as 40,000 lambs per year,” Burnham recalled. “They encouraged others to try wintering lambs, and the venture became so popular that San Saba was called the ‘grazing mecca.’ By 1951, the profits on gain and pasturage on lambs meant an extra million dollars additional income to the county.” In 1951, when the seven-year drought started in Texas, Owen Brothers found a cattleman’s paradise in South Dakota. The rich lands along the Missouri River furnished an abundance of tall gumbo and gamma grasses along the Rolling Plains. The brothers purchased several ranches, totaling about 38,000 acres, and leased grazing lands from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. In its heyday, Owen Brothers would ship from 2,000 to 3,000 head of cattle, usually filling 40 to 50 or more rail cars, to South Dakota grass in the summers, Bill Owen told me in an interview in 1966. The cowboys counted on 43 to 45 head of cattle per car. A 100-car train was hard to manage, he said. “Too many cattle at the rest stop.” The longest train he recalled shipping had 107 cars...more