Historic Waggoner Ranch For Sale, Headquarters-Vernon, Texas

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-famous-texas-waggoner-ranch-for-sale/

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On Christmas Day 1909, W.T. “Tom” Waggoner gave his three children land, cattle, and horses valued at $6 million—about $150 million in today’s dollars. Waggoner, whose kids called him Pappy, wasn’t even that wealthy yet.

He was a cattle and horse man like his father, Dan Waggoner, who started buying acreage around 1850. The ranch went from large to vast after the Waggoners earned $55,000 selling longhorns on a Kansas cattle drive in 1870. By the 20th century, the Waggoner reverse-triple-D brand was a Texas icon. Train loads of spectators came to watch President Teddy Roosevelt hunt wolves on the property. Will Rogers, the most famous American humorist of the 1920s and early ’30s, visited frequently, sometimes playing polo.

Watering cattle was a challenge then, as it is today. Tom Waggoner was irked that his ranch hands kept finding crude oil when they drilled for water. He calmed down after the rise of the automobile. Rogers joked, “I see there’s an oil well for every cow.”

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