Page 95 - July 2019

grandparents are the ones who first moved
to the United States from Sweden in 1867 and moved to Briscoe County, where we live, in 1892. My great-great grandfather moved to the Texas Panhandle in the 1870s and in the 1890s, he began to purchase land on the outside of the JA Ranch [the oldest privately owned cattle ranch in the Palo Duro Canyon section of the Texas Panhandle], where he worked as a cowboy.
“While my parents are both still healthy,
I want to learn as much as I can from them and keep as much of this way of life together as possible,” she says. “Too much blood, sweat and tears have gone into this ranch for me
to not honor that as best I can. I feel like it’s important to preserve our ranching history and heritage as a whole.”
As part of honoring the ranching lifestyle, Amy’s family’s ranch received the Texas Department of Agriculture’s Family Land Heritage Award for 100 years of continuous ownership. “My grandmother will be 95 in October and we wanted to take advantage
of her historical memory, so we applied for the award. She and I flew to Austin for the presentation in 2016,” Amy says.
About a year after Amy returned to the ranch, the woman who had handled the equine end of Knorpp Insurance retired. “I called Amy and asked her if she’d be interested in helping with the equine and livestock insurance,”
Walt says. Amy, who had also worked for the Knorpps as a receptionist for a summer while in high school, now spends two days a week at the office and also attends the sales with Walt and Janice. “I guess you could say that I’m the owner and Amy is the manager,” Walt says.
“Although I’ve been around horses all my
life on the ranch, for all intents and purposes, race horses and insurance were both entirely
new to me,” Amy says. “At my age, I was a little bit scared about learning a new business, but opportunities to do that don’t arise very often in a town the size of Clarendon. I always have a lot of questions trying to learn; my nickname growing up was ‘Why Why Thornberry,’ but Walt and Janice have been very good teachers. They’re both extremely patient and I appreciate that.
“Insurance itself may not necessarily be all that interesting,” Amy adds, “but the people I’ve gotten to meet are a phenomenal group. Everyone has been very welcoming and very
patient. It’s been really nice to put faces with the names of people in the business that I work with over the phone throughout the year.”
Asked what the biggest challenge is for her in the Quarter Horse industry, Amy replies that as with ranching, the racing lifestyle is under threat. “There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation right now in the Quarter Horse industry, and we have a lot of work to do to preserve that history and way of life, be it racing or whatever other aspect.”
Over the next few years, Amy plans to keep up with both her ranch and her insurance endeavors. “When things around you are changing, especially in terms of the ranch and maintaining everything, I’d just like to be able to stay the course long term,” she says. “That will involve changes, but I can take those as they come.”
“I’m very pleased that she agreed to work with us,” Walt says. “Immediately after she got the job, she applied for and got her insurance license and she applies all of her insurance knowledge to everything.”
“You’ve got to admire somebody who gets out there and does things that lots of women won’t or don’t do,” says Nancy. “I don’t think Amy is scared of much. She’s pretty laid back, she’s real soft spoken, but she gets her job done.”
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“Too much blood, sweat and tears have gone into this ranch for me to not honor that as best I can. I feel like it’s
important to preserve our ranching history and heritage as a whole.” - Amy