Page 22 - The Wellborn 2R Beef Story eBook

“Gunfight at the Ranch”
Many traces of Texas history can be found around the
ranch. One such piece of evidence is a crudely engraved
gravestone near the headquarters. As the story goes
according to Henry Scheer Jr., in 1873 John Murphy owned
land that eventually became the Scheer Ranch, now
Wellborn 2R Ranch. He had hired several men to help him
- Frank Smith, Ed Koozier (brother of John Murphy’s wife,
Esther) and John Barrington. Murphy had employed them
to stay with his family and do farm work while he was
gone from the ranch.
When he returned things hadn’t gone as he wanted and
the whole outfit got into a fight - the three employed
men against John Murphy. They shot Murphy in the face
with a load of shot and while he was in the house washing
the blood from his face, someone stuck a Winchester
through a crack in the house and shot him in the back and
killed him. Smith fled the scene and stole a good horse of
Murphy’s but was captured by soldiers near Fort Sill and
returned to the officers in Texas. Upon Murphy’s death,
John Barrington immediately married his widow, Esther,
who was also the sister of another one of the wanted men,
Ed Koozier. The Barringtons were arrested a few days
after Murphy was killed, but they gave a straw bond, left
the country and were never heard from again. No account
was given about Koozier.
Frank Smith was brought to trial on April 8, 1874 and was
convicted of the crime of murder in the first degree and
sentenced to hang. He was held in jail until the hanging
execution took place on May 14, 1875. John Murphy’s
gravestone made of native rock marks his burial site just a
few hundred yards from where the barn still stands at the
north section of Wellborn 2R.
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This gravestone on the ranch marks the place where then
landowner John Murphy is buried. He was shot in the
back by his employee, Frank Smith.
“Legacy of the Land”
The Wellborn 2R ranch is made up of two main tracts -
the original Scheer Ranch and the Priddy 2R Ranch and
encompasses 8,300 acres located near the town of Henri-
etta, Clay County Texas. The location just happens to be
almost dead center of the distance between the East and
West coast of the United States. Like other ranches in
Clay county, the Wellborn 2R ranch is the ideal place to
raise Black Angus cattle and Coastal Bermuda Hay.
The two tracts of land that make up the ranch each have
amazing stories to tell of pioneers that traveled west to
realize their dreams. It’s a tale of cowboys and Indians, of
a murder and burial on the ranch, of a poor farm including
its own jail house to manage the indigent, of a prominent
business man and his wife, Robert and Ruby Priddy, whose
name the southern portion ranch bares and who left a for-
tune via The Priddy Foundation to the city of Wichita Falls,
Texas. And finally the realization of a dream of its current
owners, Chris and Joan Wellborn, to invest in the ranch
and preserve its culture and beauty.