I am descended from James and Katherine Lowndes of (Nether) Arthurlie.
They once lived in Nether Arthurlie House, which is now the former St Mary’s Convent.
This is my family history.

Download full the full document as a PDF File (232kb)

Jay & Trish Lowndes: tlowndes@verizon.net

5) The Journey to America

While still in England, my grandfather, Charles James Edward Lowndes, landed a job with the London-based Cedar Valley Land and Cattle Company, which owned the T-Anchor Ranch in the Texas Panhandle.

After leaving his home in Liverpool, he landed at the Port of Galveston in 1885 and travelled to the company's office in Kansas City. After meeting the folks in the office, Grandad rode a train to Trinidad, Colorado, bought a horse, and rode all the way to the ranch headquarters, a log cabin on the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. (Recently, the Texas State Historical Society designated the log cabin as a state historical landmark and moved it to the grounds of its museum and library on the panhandle campus of Texas Tech University.)

When Randall County was organized and county taxes drove Cedar Valley out of business, grandfather helped found the city of Amarillo, where I was born, and made his career at its First National Bank.


Shown above are photos of the T-Anchor Ranch headquarters as it now stands on the grounds of the Panhandle Plains Historical Society Museum in Canyon, Texas. Obscured behind the buildings and trees is the most important piece of equipment on the premises. Since surface water was so scarce, ranchers and farmers could not have lived on the Great Plains without windmills to pump water from considerable depths. Grandad told the society that the time he spent working here was "the best five years" of his life.