The Mohair Country

Almost nothing grows on this country that a person can eat, and for most of the twentieth century that fact made Terrell County a place for sheep and Angora goats. The Angora is the animal that made the Edwards Plateau and the Trans Pecos productive: it converts brush and thin browse into a fibre that is lustrous, takes dye brilliantly, and is worth many times the weight of wool. Texas grew about ninety percent of the mohair in the United States, and towns like Sanderson existed partly as places to get the clip onto a train. The peak is precisely dated. The Texas Angora herd reached more than four and a half million animals in 1965, producing over thirty one million pounds of mohair, and then fell to about one and a quarter million by 1976. Asked why, ranchers surveyed in the early 1980s put predators first, ahead of everything else, which in this terrain are close to impossible to keep out. Those who had already sold out named mohair prices second; those still holding on named disease, and competition from synthetic fibre. The herds never came back to what they were, and Congress voted away the wool and mohair price supports in 1993. Terrell County ran ninety thousand sheep in 1984 and under two thousand by 2022, and cattle now out sell the whole sheep and goat side of its farm income. The freight house built at Sanderson to move the wool and mohair was pulled down in 2012; pieces of it are in the county museum.