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In 1905
the region was opened to small farmers, who settled on choice 150-acre
plots and a year later the
Chicago,
Rock Island and Gulf Railway established a station at Glenrio. The settlement began to bustle with cattle and freight shipments. Initially the area was primarily populated by large cattle ranches but
as time passed much of the surrounding land was planted in wheat and
sorghum and the farming expansion was responsible for most of the
growth of the area population.
A post
office was established on the
New Mexico side of the
community, but the mail arrived at the railroad depot located on the
Texas side. Sitting in
its precarious location crossing
Texas and
New Mexico, Glenrio
became the subject of a long battle between both states for tax
rights.
New Mexico Post
Office, May, 2004, David Alexander.
By 1920 Glenrio
had a hotel, a hardware store, and a land office, as well as several
grocery stores, service stations, and cafes. A newspaper, the Glenrio
Tribune, was published from 1910 to 1934. There were no
bars on the
Texas side of the community,
since Deaf Smith County was dry, and no service stations on the
New Mexico side because of
that state's higher gasoline tax.
During the
prosperity of the 1920s politicians and entrepreneurs decided that America
needed a national highway system, and a decade later
Route 66
was born. In 1938, just months after the final pavement through
Llano Estacado (the Staked Plains)
terrain of
Route 66 was finished, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was
filmed in
Glenrio for three weeks.
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