In 1857 Texans walked two herds to Quincy, Illinois. The outfits went by Waco, Preston and Fort Gibson. One was the herd of Jesse Day of Hays County. Day, of Tennessee birth, was well known not only as a cowman but as a freighter. He kept several wagons and teams busy hauling goods from Gulf ports to Austin. On this drive, Day's nineteen-year-old son, James Monroe, better known as Doc, went along as one of the trail hands.
Texans took several herds north in the spring of 1860. From Hays County, Jesse Day started out with a large herd of beeves. On April 22, while swimming his cattle across the swollen Brazos River at Waco, Day was drowned. After burying him at Belton, two of his sons, William and Monroe (Doc), went on with the herd. They headed the steers toward Kansas City but were blocked by a force of armed settlers. Finally they trailed the cattle to St. Louis, where they sold at good prices.
James Monroe (Doc) Day, who, with his brother William, had taken a herd north in the difficult year of 1860, trailed one of several thousand head to Abilene in 1868.
On the trail in the spring of 1869 were at least two of the Day brothers—sometimes called the Week boys because there were seven of them. They were the sons of Jesse Day, who had been drowned in the spring of 1860 while swimming a trail herd across the Brazos at Waco. All seven sons were Confederate veterans and pioneer cowmen. Addison J. Day made his first trip as a trail hand, leaving Belton with eight hundred beeves and crossing into the Indian Territory at Red River Station. Late in the spring, the eldest brother, Colonel William H. Day, joined his brother-in-law, Jesse M. Driskill, in gathering a trail herd of fifteen hundred head. Losing a hundred on the way, the partners sold the remaining fourteen hundred at Abilene in the summer.
A bit disappointed that their new rail line had failed to wean most of the drovers from the old cow paths, some Denison people were trying a new tack to draw business their way. With the help of Colonel William H. Day, they built a packing plant to slaughter cattle and ship the meat in the new refrigerator cars, which cost $1110 each. The meat sold in New York at six cent a pound. The new firm, the American and Texas Refrigerator Car Company—later the Texas and Atlantic—hired Joseph G. McCoy of Abilene fame to promote its business.
Denison boosters had high hopes for this project. On February 5, 1874, a visitor reported, "Already three trains of ten cars each, containing the dressed carcasses of more than four hundred cattle have reached the Washington market. There competent judges pronounce the beef as sweet and perfect as if just killed." A month later, on March 4, the Daily News declared that the success of the company was no longer in question. The latest shipment, it added, had found a ready and profitable market in New York. "This company paid more for fat cattle at the yards in this city than the drovers could have realized by shipping to St. Louis or Chicago. The advantage of Denison as a cattle market is apparent."
Early in May, McCoy and Colonel Day ranged as far west as Gainesville to buy cattle for the packing plant. They contracted for a thousand head of fat beeves. The capacity of this local plant, though, was too small to make much dent in the trail driving.
In Austin, on April 2, 1875, Colonel William H. Day wrote that about 30,000 head had crossed the Colorado River at that point. "They were looking pretty well," he said, "considering the shortness of the grass." At Dodge City in 1879, among the larger trail herds was that of veteran Mark A. Withers, of Lockhart, who sold his yearling steers to the Day brothers.
Wayne Gard, The Chisholm Trail
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Colonel William Day, who came into Coleman County in 1876 from Missouri, was the first man in the county to buy his land. William Day was the son of Jesse Day, who operated a fleet of prairie schooners from Missouri to Texas. He would bring a load of merchandise into Texas and take back cattle to Missouri. When Col. Day bought his land his neighbors all thought he was crazy. "Why buy land," said they, "when all the county is an open range?"
In 1879 Mr. Day married Miss Mabel Doss, a pioneer music teacher in Kidd-Key College at Sherman, Texas. They came directly to the ranch in Coleman County, traveled in an old fashioned coach of the stage coach type, built Pullman style with beds that folded up. They lived in this coach until a house could be procured. The manner in which the Days acquired their first house reveals the real spirit of the Texas pioneer. There was a small two-room rock house on the land when Mr. Day bought it which housed a squatters family. The name "squatter" was given to the class of people who moved from place to place, never owning any land, or anything else much. They stopped wherever they found a shelter and a place to graze the team which drew their ramshackle wagon, moving on when necessary.
Mr. Day needed the house and asked the squatter if he would sell his house. The man replied, "Yes, I reckon I would. The old woman is homesick and wants to go back to East Texas where we come from." The question as to what he would take for it elicited this classic: "Well, we are a little short of groceries right now and I guess a sack of flour and a side of bacon would be about right." The trade was made and the information volunteered that they could get away by "daylight tomorrow." The few worldly possessions of the homesick nester scarcely filled the decrepit wagon which the team pulled creakingly across the prairie.
When Mrs. Day, young and lonely, wished to follow her husband about over the ranch during the spring round-up, or the many weeks of fence building they simply packed up the old coach and camped along for weeks with the outfit, eating at the chuck wagon with the cowboys, as Mrs. Day said, "The best steaks I ever tasted." The old coach was later sold to the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Shows.
The first large pasture fence built in the county was the one Mr. Day built and called the Red Wire fence because it was painted red. It enclosed 7,500 acres and was built in 1881. The building of this fence which shut off a large portion of the hitherto open range marked a turning point in the cattle industry in the county.
Tom Johnson, cowman on Home Creek, sums it up this way: "In the early eighties everybody began buying or preempting their land and fencing it up. I remember that old man Sam Avants and his son-in-law, Elbert Hull, spent about two years cutting posts and hauling them to build their fence on their place below me towards the river. By building fences to segregate the cattle an improvement could be made in the cattle themselves. Col. Day brought the first white face Herefords. In 1882 cattle jumped from $8.00 to $20.00 a head and everybody tried to get into the cattle business."
Beatrice Grady Gay, Into the Setting Sun: A History of Coleman County
Leaday
In 1881, there were two stores at the famous Trap Crossing, which was the crossing on the Colorado of the road from Coleman City to Fort Concho, now San Angelo. Thousands and thousands of cattle being driven up the trail to Kansas also crossed at this point. A store on the Concho side of the river was called “The Trigger,” and the one on the Coleman side was “The Trap.” In the Trap store was a post office named “Rich Coffey” Texas. This store was washed away in 1882. An old grave yard is located on a high point near the Trap Crossing, where the earliest white persons in this area were buried.
Until 1900, the Day Ranch was operated as a cattle ranch. During her life, Mrs. Day struggled with a very heavy debt of over $100,000 on which she had to pay as high as 18 percent interest. Finally, at the turn of the century, she decided to cut the ranch up into small tracts and sell it to settlers. By this action, she brought into the southwest part of Coleman County more than 500 families. The Day Ranch was the first of the Coleman County ranches to be opened for settlement. With the coming of settlers, Mrs. Day sought to establish towns as trading centers. It was on Dec. 19, 1904, that she staked the town of Leaday for her daughter, Mrs. J. Tom Padgitt, the former Willie Day, who owned the land there. A post office was established there and the name of Leaday was taken from a combination of Mrs. Day’s two husbands’ names.
Leaday was built one mile east of the Trap Crossing on higher ground and on the banks of Grape Creek. It was originally surveyed out to be a town larger than Coleman. Mrs. Lea made a determined effort to have the Santa Fe Railroad built through this location in 1886. A Mr. Moore built the first store at Leaday in 1905. Then work started on a 2-story hotel which stood in Leaday many years. Excavations were made for a bank building which was never completed, but the hole is still in evidence on Main Street. Between the hotel and the bank location was the public square. At the other end of the street was the school and nearby, at the bluff overlooking the Gin crossing on the Colorado, was the cotton gin.
On the river between the gin lot and the mouth of Grape Creek was Chautauqua Park, which was to be the campus of an industrial college which never materialized. At this time, or soon afterwards, Leaday had three stores, a Woodman of the World hall, a blacksmith shop and a population of over 100. Mr. H. T. Crenshaw had the first mail contract and drove a one-seated hack daily from Leaday to Valera and returned. He then lived in a dugout on the west side of town. Mr. Faircloth was a merchant in Leaday for several years, and Mr. H. W. Wireman operated the main store there for over 20 years.
Until after World War I and the coming of the automobile and good roads, Leaday did a large business. People living in the country seldom went to Coleman or Ballinger more than twice a year. Roads were rough pasture trails, and they traveled in wagons. The Leaday stores carried shoes, hardware and farm supplies, and there was little need to go the long way to town. But with the coming of the automobile and paved roads, the country cross roads went into eclipse, and the Leaday farmer, along with others, found that he could haul his cotton to town and while it was being ginned, he could take in a movie, and have a wider selection of things he needed to buy. That killed the country gin, and threw the village into a rapid decline.
Even so, as late as 1930, weekly rodeos were held. They were held every Saturday afternoon during the summer in the rodeo arena just south of the Wireman store. It was a three event rodeo, with calf roping, goat roping, and bullriding being the main attractions. The affair gained fame, and it was not uncommon to see over 50 contestants and some 500 spectators at the shows. They lasted until the early 1940’s when the second World War broke up so many things - one of which was the Leaday Rodeo.
At the close of World War II, Leaday had a population of about 100, a cotton gin, and four stores. Today, the area population is 55 and there is less than 20 people in Leaday itself. All these families have been there for generations: Allen, Stephenson, Jamison, Walden, Hudson, Pyburn, and Padgitt.
Glen Wilson, Coleman County Chronicle, July 3, 1958
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Mabel Doss was born in Missouri in 1854. She trained as a music teacher at Transylvania University. She met her future husband, ranching entrepreneur William H. Day, in Austin in the late 1870s. Following their marriage in 1879, William and Mabel Doss Day moved onto the Coleman County lands which Day had purchased the previous year. They occupied a small stone house located on Grape Creek to the north of the present ranch headquarters complex. This little structure, which had been built in the mid-1870s by an earlier settler, Bill McAulay, became the nucleus for the Day Ranch for many years to come and continued as the ranch headquarters until the construction of the present house. One of Day's first enterprises was the fencing of a 7500-acre portion of his land with cedar posts and wire from Austin, the wire of a reddish color. The tract became known as the "Red Wire Pasture," and the act of fencing the previously open range was the cause of much disturbance in the area for many years. Day died in 1881 from injuries incurred during a stampede, leaving his widow Mabel Doss Day with their infant child, Willie Mabel Day, and debts and claims to the amount of $117,000. Mrs. Day immediately organized a corporation known as the Day Cattle Ranch Company in an effort to clear her debts. She survived the vagaries of the cattle market, and while she never cleared the ranch of debt completely, she gained a well-earned reputation for business acumen and aggressive ranch management. One of the first problems she encountered was the great flood of 1882, then, beginning in 1883, a fence-cutting war which destroyed over 100 miles of wire along the Red Wire Pasture. Partially through her efforts, the state legislature enacted a law penalizing fence cutting, an act which quickly ended the problem. By 1885 Mrs. Day was running 9,000 head of cattle on the Day Ranch. Heavily in debt and sometimes forced to pay interest as high as 8 per cent, she held tenaciously to her program. In the period of the 1880s, Mabel Day's intelligent control of situations, whatever might arise, gained her the title "Cattle Queen of Texas."
William H. Day was born in Georgia in 1833, moved with his family to Texas in 1847 and assisted with his father's freighting business. He took a degree in civil engineering at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1858, and returned to Texas and accompanied members of his family in a cattle drive to Kansas City. When the Civil War broke out, he was stationed at Camp Colorado in Coleman County; he mustered out in 1862 to assist in a cattle drive to Louisiana. In 1868 he formed a partnership with a brother-in-law, driving a herd to Abilene, Kansas. In the early 1870s he was employed with a St. Louis firm, a packing plan in Denison, Texas, and other activities, engaged chiefly in traveling throughout the Texas livestock-raising regions to assess the post-war status of the cattle industry. His conclusion was that the practice of open range grazing was no longer viable. In the future ranchers would need to own their lands, and with clear title, and those lands would need to be fenced. In 1878 he purchased large tracts of Coleman County land near where he had been stationed during the Civil War. The purchase was from the commissioners of the Fort Bend and Brazoria Counties School Lands. These lands had been held since the 1840s for the school revenues of those southern counties. The ranch he put together in these transactions stretched from Grape Creek on the north, Elm Creek on the east, bordering on the west and south to the Colorado River, approximately 80,000 acres.
In 1889 Mabel Day married Captain J. C. Lea of New Mexico. Lea had moved into the Pecos Valley in 1877 and formed the Lea Cattle Company on a large landholding on which he founded the town of Roswell, New Mexico. Mabel Doss Day Lea left the Day Ranch in the charge of her brother, Will Doss, and moved with her husband to Roswell where together, among other enterprises, in 1891 they created the present-day New Mexico Military Institute. In 1898 drought and blizzards collapsed Lea's ranching endeavors; he died a few years later in Roswell, leaving his wife again in debt. Mabel Day Lea returned to Coleman County sometime after the turn of the century after a long residence in New Mexico; she was present when the new town of Leaday was staked out of a portion of the Day Ranch in December of 1904. She is remembered visiting the site during the construction of the house, and she may have occupied the partially-finished house or maybe the office structure for a brief time, and much work, probably the finishing of the house and re-facing with stucco, was done subsequently. A range of 1904-1909 is probably correct for the building period.
The remainder of Mabel Lea's life was devoted to attempts to finance and refinance the Day Ranch and to pass it on, debt-free, to her daughter, Willie Day. She was appointed as a commissioner to the St. Louis World's Fair where she promoted Coleman County as an ideal destination point for homeseekers, and she tirelessly continued her efforts to attract settlers in the region. In 1904 Willie Day married Tom Padgitt, member of a Dallas family who had a successful saddlery and harness business. Together in the years 1904-1905 the Padgitt couple and Mabel Day Lea began to formulate an ambitious scheme for the subdivision of the Day Ranch. A surveyor was hired to resurvey the ranch into small parcels to attract homesteaders. A new town, named Leaday to honor Mabel Lea's two husbands, was platted in the vicinity of the ranch headquarters at the site of a much-traveled old crossing of the Colorado River. Hotels were constructed at Leaday and at the nearby village of Voss to accommodate the prospective homesteaders when they came to inspect the new homestead sites. The new Day Ranch headquarters complex was laid out at a new location at the edge of a high bluff on the river south of the new Leaday townsite, and the construction of the main house was begun. The structures are located in Block 42, Fort Bend Survey 224. This is land which was patented to the school commissioners of Fort Bend County in 1848 and sold by them to Mabel Day Lea's first husband, William H. Day, in 1878. Day died in 1881 and ownership passed to his widow Mabel Day; following her death, ownership passed to their daughter, Willie Mabel Day Padgitt.
Mabel Doss Day Lea died in April, 1906, and some phases of her development scheme were never realized by her heir, Willie Day Padgitt. In 1907 the Padgitts sold a great portion of the Day Ranch, chiefly the Red Wire and the Bull Hollow Pastures, to the Miller banking family of Belton. The Millers followed the policy established by Mabel Day Lea of subdividing their property, which was now called the Day-Miller Ranch. Thus in the period 1905-1930s the Padgitts and Millers changed the face of their portion of the Coleman County countryside. Dozens of tenant houses were constructed, sometimes connected by new roads with well-built bridges; windmills and tanks were built; the Leaday township began to grow; new schools and churches were constructed; gins and silos were provided. This open and almost unpopulated area became thick with structures and people. However, most homesteaders found it too difficult to practice subsistence farming on land that was more suited to ranching. The failure of cotton markets and the impact of the Depression disintegrated the tenancy policy. Those remaining in the Leaday vicinity turned increasingly to livestock production. Gradually the tenant houses were abandoned, becoming elements in an almost extinct agricultural landscape. The land was eventually repossessed and reintegrated into the original Day-Padgitt and Day-Miller Ranches. By the mid-1950s a configuration of land use and property ownership was resumed comparable to the period when William Day first began to fence in the open range.
In 1979 the Texas Water Commission granted permission to the Colorado River Municipal Water District, and entity based in Big Spring, to construct a large dam on the Colorado River. The site chosen was a location several miles downstream from Leaday, sixteen miles below the confluence of the Colorado and Concho Rivers. Early in the planning stages, a program was developed to address environmental concerns, including the impact of the proposed flood area on prehistoric and historic cultural resources. In 1980-1981 a survey of historical cultural resources was conducted by Freeman and Freeman under contract to Espey, Huston and Associates, a firm of Austin environmental consultants. Subsequently a number of other studies and amplifications of previous studies have been conducted. In early 1988 an Albuquerque, New Mexico, firm of environmental scientists, Mariah Associates, Inc., began further assessment of the area of the flood plain, including various archaeological investigations and assessments. Mariah has also acted in the roll of coordinator of related projects, including this project: the recordation of nineteen endangered historic sites in the confluence area for the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record. The sites were selected from a list compiled under the guidance of the Texas Historical Commission. Construction was finished on the dam in the late summer of 1989. Called the Stacy Dam and Reservoir, the project will inundate approximately 19,200 acres.
Township
Located near the site of Trap Crossing, an old and much-traveled crossing of the Colorado River on the road from Coleman to Fort Concho, the Leaday townsite was laid out in 1904 by local rancher Mabel Doss Day Lea on her great Day Ranch lands in a period when she was planning a subdivision of the ranch into tenant farms. The town was intended to accommodate prospective homesteaders and to serve them once they settled in the vicinity. It satisfied these functions for a number of years until the failure of cotton markets and the impact of the Depression disintegrated the tenant policy. The townsite continued in the ownership of Mabel Day Lea's descendants and the descendants of the Miller family, purchasers of a portion of the Day Ranch. The town was never completed to the extent of its ambitious first plan, and it began to shrink after the first ten years of its life. It was much depleted by the 1950s and abandoned by the late 1980s. Nevertheless, the little town had a strong cultural impact on the surrounding countryside for two generations of farmers and ranchers.
The Leaday townsite occupies land that had been set aside in the 1840s for the Brazoria and Fort Bend Counties' school revenues and was under the directorship of the school commissioners for those counties. It was for many years populated only by roving Indian groups and occasionally an intrepid band of cattle drivers.
The first permanent settler in the vicinity was Rich Coffey who established himself in 1862 on upper Elm Creek between the present-day towns of Leaday and Voss. Coffey's place was called Flat Top Settlement, a group of rough cabins palisaded for defense against the Indians. In 1869 Coffey relocated to another site in the vicinity, this time at the confluence of the Concho and Colorado Rivers, where he established a second fortified compound and continued to run cattle; this new location was about two-and-one-half miles to the west of the future townsite. This second Coffey settlement became the family's permanent homestead and continued in the ownership of Coffey descendants until the late 1980s.
Other early settlers were William J. Hogue, who was situated west of Leaday; and James C. Swift, who located to the east on Elm Creek, on land which became known as Swift's Hole. Yet another early settler, Bill McAulay, settled on Grape Creek a little over a mile to the northwest of Leaday and in the mid-1870s built a small stone house which became the first headquarters of the Day Ranch. The McAulay structure still stands.
These early pioneers established a convenient cattle crossing of the Colorado River immediately southwest of the future townsite. A store was established on a bluff on the Concho County side of the crossing called The Trap, and the place itself took on the name of Trap Crossing. A post office called "Rich Coffey, Texas" was located in the old Trap store. Another store, The Trigger, was located on the opposite bank of the river. Both the Trap and Trigger stores were washed away in the great flood of 1882. Although the crossing changed locations several times in the nineteenth century, the original Trap Crossing was located just to the west of the present-day Leaday Crossing, upriver from the existing house on the Gann Ranch.
In 1878 ranching entrepreneur William H. Day purchased from the Fort Bend County and Brazoria County school commissioners a very large tract which included the site of Leaday, the future townsite lying on the far west boundary of the new Day Ranch, lands which spread to the north, east, and south for several thousand acres. In the early 1870s Day had traveled throughout the Texas livestock-raising regions to assess the post-Civil War status of the cattle industry. From this experience Day had concluded that the practice of open range grazing was no longer viable and that in the future ranchers would have to own their grazing lands. When he moved onto his new Coleman lands, Day made his headquarters at the McAulay stone house and immediately began fencing a 7500-acre portion of his land which became the locally famous Red Wire Pasture. This act precipitated wire-cutting and range wars for several years.
William Day had married Mabel Doss in 1879, and the operation of the Day Ranch was their joint endeavor until his sudden death in 1881. Mabel Doss Day was left with their infant child, Willie Mabel Day, and debts of over one hundred thousand dollars. She immediately began arrangements to refinance the Day Ranch and to consolidate the operations of the ranch, earning a reputation for intelligent management which gained her a great deal of celebrity, both locally and throughout the Texas cattle ranching area. Among other problems she encountered was the great flood of 1882 and in 1883 the beginning of a fence-cutting war which destroyed many miles of wire along the Day Ranch borders. In the 1880s she began to formulate an elaborate plan for subdividing the ranch lands which eventually would be realized by her daughter and son-in-law, including negotiating, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Santa Fe Railroad to run a line through her ranch in the vicinity of the future Leaday townsite. In 1889 Mabel Day remarried; her second husband was Captain J. C. Lea of New Mexico, who had put together a large ranch in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico, a project as ambitious as the Coleman County projects of her first husband. She left a brother in charge of the Day Ranch and moved to New Mexico to the town of Roswell which had been built on Lea's ranch. Together she and Lea founded the present-day New Mexico Military Academy. The Lea Ranch and various Lea-related projects in New Mexico began to suffer set-backs in the 1890s, and when Lea died, his widow found herself once more in debt.
Mabel Day Lea was determined to leave her daughter Willie Day debt-free. She returned to Texas to the Day Ranch in 1904 and continued her earlier scheme of subdivision, including the project which had been gradually germinating of a new town to be located on the ranch near the old Trap Crossing of the Colorado River. As a town-builder she was no doubt drawing on the experience gathered through assisting her second husband at his new town of Roswell. Among other efforts, Mabel Day Lea had herself appointed a commissioner of the St. Louis World's Fair [Louisiana Purchase Exposition, in 1904] where she promoted West Texas, and specifically Coleman County, as an ideal destination point for homesteaders. Willie Day married Tom Padgitt in 1904, and on December 19 of that year Mabel Day Lea and the Padgitts staked out the new town at its present location on high ground near Grape Creek, one mile east of Trap Crossing. A post office was established and named "Leaday" in honor of Mabel Lea's two husbands. Advertisements were placed across the country to attract settlers; plans were made for various buildings at the townsite, and various tenant houses planned for the ranch subdivision. Construction was begun on a new headquarters house for the Day Ranch, interrupted by Mabel Day Lea's death in 1906. In 1907 Willie Day Padgitt and her husband sold a great portion of the Day Ranch, including the Red Wire Pasture, to the Miller banking family of Belton. The Millers followed the policy of subdivision established by Mabel Day Lea and continued by the Padgitts, and together the Padgitts and Millers proceeded with the development of the new town of Leaday. Under the new arrangement, the townsite lands were not held by both families: the eastern and southern portion owned by the Millers, adjacent to their newly-formed Day-Miller Ranch, and the western and northern portion by the Padgitts, bordering on their remaining lands, henceforth called the Day-Padgitt Ranch.
The unsigned town plan was formally platted and the drawing filed at the Coleman County Courthouse, 14 March 1906. The drawing probably pre-dates the 1906 recordation; it may be based on an earlier drawing from 1904, the year Mabel Day Lea and the Padgitts staked out the town; or it may be based on a drawing of an even earlier date, as Mrs. Lea had been considering a scheme for a town on the ranch for some time before her return to the area.
Although never completed to the extent of the ambitious recorded drawing of the plan, the basic configuration of the planned town was carried out, and the general placement of its various elements remained faithful to the original plan. The Leaday plan was based on a strong north-south axis along its major street, Main Street, with cross-streets delineating rows of residential blocks. The southern end of Main Street was planned to connect with the old road over the Trap Crossing of the Colorado River. At this southern fringe of the town was a tract designated "Gin Lot," and directly to the west by Grape Creek, a large tract was set aside for an industrial college campus site, the surrounding grounds to be called "Chatauqua Park." On Main Street, a few blocks north of the river, a block was allotted for a school; and farther north on Main Street, lots set aside for a hotel, a bank, mercantile stores, and other structures.
The plan drawing described a town nine blocks wide and thirteen blocks long on the north-south axis, with wide areas for expansion to the north and east. Only a fraction of this area was ever developed. The college was never realized and most of the residential blocks remained undeveloped. The school was constructed, and the northern end of Main Street developed somewhat with the construction of a church, a group of stores, a blacksmith shop, the hotel, and some residences.
Building construction in Leaday was begun immediately on several structures, a two-story woodframe hotel being finished by May 1905. Mabel Day Lea also had constructed another hotel at the little nearby town of Voss. Both hotels were to provide accommodation for prospective homesteaders as they came to view the new tenant farmsteads opening up on the Day Ranch. The first Leaday mercantile store was built in 1905; soon there were three stores in the new town. As many as fifty houses were constructed, including a dugout on the west side of town. A non-denominational church, built to serve various religious groups, eventually attended mainly by Baptists, was constructed on the east side of Main Street and called Union Church. At the south end of Main Street, on the school grounds site allocated in the original town plan, a school was erected in 1906; a separate auditorium building was constructed about 1917. Other buildings in the first phase of construction were a post office; a blacksmith shop; a livery stable; and a Woodmen of the World hall. A cotton gin was constructed about two hundreds yards south of the present-day Baptist Church; another gin was built by the Padgitts some distance south of Leaday on a bluff over the Colorado River. Excavations were made for a bank in these early years, but the structure was never completed.
In the first years of its development Leaday did a thriving local business, serving rural families who no longer had to make the arduous shopping trips to Coleman or Ballinger over roads which were still rough pasture trails. Soon Leaday had a population of over one hundred people, many of them engaged in town business activities; and many of these families remained in the area long after the town faded away, families such as Allen, Stephenson, Jamison, Walden, Hudson, Pyburn, and Padgitt. The first Leaday store was constructed for a Mr. Moore; other merchants were a Mr. Faircloth, H. W. Wireman, Ike Stephenson. The stores did not stock building lumber, but did provide building supplies such as nails and tar paper; other stock included barbed wire, farm supplies, hardware, fabric, food, clothing and shoes. The first postmaster was H. T. Crenshaw, who drove a one-seated hack daily from Leaday to the little railhead town of Valera to the northeast; he lived in a dugout on the west side of town. Later, the storekeeper Ike Stephenson, who also had a blacksmith shop, served as postmaster; and his son, James Stephenson, was the last Leady postmaster. Members of local families frequently served as teachers at Leaday School.
The local landlords, the Miller and Padgitt families, also played active community roles. One of the older vicinity residents recalled her first memory of a Leaday community gathering, a 1907 Christmas party at Leaday, given to the townspeople by the Padgitts. For the party a silver Christmas tree from Dallas was set up and gifts provided for all the children in the community, a custom continued for some years by both the Miller and Padgitt families.
After a decade, it had become apparent that the growth patten had reached a peak; the plans for various elements set forth in the original town plat had to be abandoned. By 1916, in a special court order, the Padgitts and Millers requested to have much of the townsite lands redescribed as acreage for tax purposes; the request was granted, effectively revoking most of the townsite except lots along Main Street and around the little nucleus of the present-day cluster at the north end of town. The remaining lands went back into the landholding of the Day-Padgitt and Day-Miller Ranches.
When roads began to be paved after World War I and automobiles became more and more common, farmers began taking their cotton to be ginned in the bigger towns where there was a wider selection of mercantile goods and various diversions not available at Leaday. Business at the local Padgitt and Leaday gins began to decline; finally, the Leaday gin was destroyed by a tornado in 1928. The tenant families had found subsistence farming extremely difficult on land more suitable for cattle grazing; droughts and bad cotton markets plagued the local economy; the Depression further depleted the hopes of these hard-working families. Although many of them stuck it out and moved from one tenant establishment to another in anticipation of better production, many of the families moved from the confluence area. Gradually, the tenant farms were repossessed and reintegrated into the Day-Padgitt and Day-Miller Ranches.
The town continued to shrink. The Leaday hotel was dismantled in the 1920s and the lumber was used by Tom Padgitt in the construction of tenant houses on the Day-Padgitt Ranch, but even these houses could not serve their function long and were moved by Padgitt to Coleman for a housing subdivision. By the period 1920s-1930s, Leaday town activity centered around a couple of stores; church and school functions attracted crowds; and rodeos were put on periodically. But the town was definitely on the decline. At the end of World War II Leaday had a much reduced population; the church remained and a few stores. During the 1950s most of the houses were dismantled and very little left. Eventually the old Union Church was taken down and the present-day Baptist Church constructed across Main Street from the old site. In the late 1980s only a few people occupied the town.
Texans took several herds north in the spring of 1860. From Hays County, Jesse Day started out with a large herd of beeves. On April 22, while swimming his cattle across the swollen Brazos River at Waco, Day was drowned. After burying him at Belton, two of his sons, William and Monroe (Doc), went on with the herd. They headed the steers toward Kansas City but were blocked by a force of armed settlers. Finally they trailed the cattle to St. Louis, where they sold at good prices.
James Monroe (Doc) Day, who, with his brother William, had taken a herd north in the difficult year of 1860, trailed one of several thousand head to Abilene in 1868.
On the trail in the spring of 1869 were at least two of the Day brothers—sometimes called the Week boys because there were seven of them. They were the sons of Jesse Day, who had been drowned in the spring of 1860 while swimming a trail herd across the Brazos at Waco. All seven sons were Confederate veterans and pioneer cowmen. Addison J. Day made his first trip as a trail hand, leaving Belton with eight hundred beeves and crossing into the Indian Territory at Red River Station. Late in the spring, the eldest brother, Colonel William H. Day, joined his brother-in-law, Jesse M. Driskill, in gathering a trail herd of fifteen hundred head. Losing a hundred on the way, the partners sold the remaining fourteen hundred at Abilene in the summer.
A bit disappointed that their new rail line had failed to wean most of the drovers from the old cow paths, some Denison people were trying a new tack to draw business their way. With the help of Colonel William H. Day, they built a packing plant to slaughter cattle and ship the meat in the new refrigerator cars, which cost $1110 each. The meat sold in New York at six cent a pound. The new firm, the American and Texas Refrigerator Car Company—later the Texas and Atlantic—hired Joseph G. McCoy of Abilene fame to promote its business.
Denison boosters had high hopes for this project. On February 5, 1874, a visitor reported, "Already three trains of ten cars each, containing the dressed carcasses of more than four hundred cattle have reached the Washington market. There competent judges pronounce the beef as sweet and perfect as if just killed." A month later, on March 4, the Daily News declared that the success of the company was no longer in question. The latest shipment, it added, had found a ready and profitable market in New York. "This company paid more for fat cattle at the yards in this city than the drovers could have realized by shipping to St. Louis or Chicago. The advantage of Denison as a cattle market is apparent."
Early in May, McCoy and Colonel Day ranged as far west as Gainesville to buy cattle for the packing plant. They contracted for a thousand head of fat beeves. The capacity of this local plant, though, was too small to make much dent in the trail driving.
In Austin, on April 2, 1875, Colonel William H. Day wrote that about 30,000 head had crossed the Colorado River at that point. "They were looking pretty well," he said, "considering the shortness of the grass." At Dodge City in 1879, among the larger trail herds was that of veteran Mark A. Withers, of Lockhart, who sold his yearling steers to the Day brothers.
Wayne Gard, The Chisholm Trail
* * *
Colonel William Day, who came into Coleman County in 1876 from Missouri, was the first man in the county to buy his land. William Day was the son of Jesse Day, who operated a fleet of prairie schooners from Missouri to Texas. He would bring a load of merchandise into Texas and take back cattle to Missouri. When Col. Day bought his land his neighbors all thought he was crazy. "Why buy land," said they, "when all the county is an open range?"
In 1879 Mr. Day married Miss Mabel Doss, a pioneer music teacher in Kidd-Key College at Sherman, Texas. They came directly to the ranch in Coleman County, traveled in an old fashioned coach of the stage coach type, built Pullman style with beds that folded up. They lived in this coach until a house could be procured. The manner in which the Days acquired their first house reveals the real spirit of the Texas pioneer. There was a small two-room rock house on the land when Mr. Day bought it which housed a squatters family. The name "squatter" was given to the class of people who moved from place to place, never owning any land, or anything else much. They stopped wherever they found a shelter and a place to graze the team which drew their ramshackle wagon, moving on when necessary.
Mr. Day needed the house and asked the squatter if he would sell his house. The man replied, "Yes, I reckon I would. The old woman is homesick and wants to go back to East Texas where we come from." The question as to what he would take for it elicited this classic: "Well, we are a little short of groceries right now and I guess a sack of flour and a side of bacon would be about right." The trade was made and the information volunteered that they could get away by "daylight tomorrow." The few worldly possessions of the homesick nester scarcely filled the decrepit wagon which the team pulled creakingly across the prairie.
When Mrs. Day, young and lonely, wished to follow her husband about over the ranch during the spring round-up, or the many weeks of fence building they simply packed up the old coach and camped along for weeks with the outfit, eating at the chuck wagon with the cowboys, as Mrs. Day said, "The best steaks I ever tasted." The old coach was later sold to the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Shows.
The first large pasture fence built in the county was the one Mr. Day built and called the Red Wire fence because it was painted red. It enclosed 7,500 acres and was built in 1881. The building of this fence which shut off a large portion of the hitherto open range marked a turning point in the cattle industry in the county.
Tom Johnson, cowman on Home Creek, sums it up this way: "In the early eighties everybody began buying or preempting their land and fencing it up. I remember that old man Sam Avants and his son-in-law, Elbert Hull, spent about two years cutting posts and hauling them to build their fence on their place below me towards the river. By building fences to segregate the cattle an improvement could be made in the cattle themselves. Col. Day brought the first white face Herefords. In 1882 cattle jumped from $8.00 to $20.00 a head and everybody tried to get into the cattle business."
Beatrice Grady Gay, Into the Setting Sun: A History of Coleman County
Leaday
In 1881, there were two stores at the famous Trap Crossing, which was the crossing on the Colorado of the road from Coleman City to Fort Concho, now San Angelo. Thousands and thousands of cattle being driven up the trail to Kansas also crossed at this point. A store on the Concho side of the river was called “The Trigger,” and the one on the Coleman side was “The Trap.” In the Trap store was a post office named “Rich Coffey” Texas. This store was washed away in 1882. An old grave yard is located on a high point near the Trap Crossing, where the earliest white persons in this area were buried.
Until 1900, the Day Ranch was operated as a cattle ranch. During her life, Mrs. Day struggled with a very heavy debt of over $100,000 on which she had to pay as high as 18 percent interest. Finally, at the turn of the century, she decided to cut the ranch up into small tracts and sell it to settlers. By this action, she brought into the southwest part of Coleman County more than 500 families. The Day Ranch was the first of the Coleman County ranches to be opened for settlement. With the coming of settlers, Mrs. Day sought to establish towns as trading centers. It was on Dec. 19, 1904, that she staked the town of Leaday for her daughter, Mrs. J. Tom Padgitt, the former Willie Day, who owned the land there. A post office was established there and the name of Leaday was taken from a combination of Mrs. Day’s two husbands’ names.
Leaday was built one mile east of the Trap Crossing on higher ground and on the banks of Grape Creek. It was originally surveyed out to be a town larger than Coleman. Mrs. Lea made a determined effort to have the Santa Fe Railroad built through this location in 1886. A Mr. Moore built the first store at Leaday in 1905. Then work started on a 2-story hotel which stood in Leaday many years. Excavations were made for a bank building which was never completed, but the hole is still in evidence on Main Street. Between the hotel and the bank location was the public square. At the other end of the street was the school and nearby, at the bluff overlooking the Gin crossing on the Colorado, was the cotton gin.
On the river between the gin lot and the mouth of Grape Creek was Chautauqua Park, which was to be the campus of an industrial college which never materialized. At this time, or soon afterwards, Leaday had three stores, a Woodman of the World hall, a blacksmith shop and a population of over 100. Mr. H. T. Crenshaw had the first mail contract and drove a one-seated hack daily from Leaday to Valera and returned. He then lived in a dugout on the west side of town. Mr. Faircloth was a merchant in Leaday for several years, and Mr. H. W. Wireman operated the main store there for over 20 years.
Until after World War I and the coming of the automobile and good roads, Leaday did a large business. People living in the country seldom went to Coleman or Ballinger more than twice a year. Roads were rough pasture trails, and they traveled in wagons. The Leaday stores carried shoes, hardware and farm supplies, and there was little need to go the long way to town. But with the coming of the automobile and paved roads, the country cross roads went into eclipse, and the Leaday farmer, along with others, found that he could haul his cotton to town and while it was being ginned, he could take in a movie, and have a wider selection of things he needed to buy. That killed the country gin, and threw the village into a rapid decline.
Even so, as late as 1930, weekly rodeos were held. They were held every Saturday afternoon during the summer in the rodeo arena just south of the Wireman store. It was a three event rodeo, with calf roping, goat roping, and bullriding being the main attractions. The affair gained fame, and it was not uncommon to see over 50 contestants and some 500 spectators at the shows. They lasted until the early 1940’s when the second World War broke up so many things - one of which was the Leaday Rodeo.
At the close of World War II, Leaday had a population of about 100, a cotton gin, and four stores. Today, the area population is 55 and there is less than 20 people in Leaday itself. All these families have been there for generations: Allen, Stephenson, Jamison, Walden, Hudson, Pyburn, and Padgitt.
Glen Wilson, Coleman County Chronicle, July 3, 1958
* * *
Mabel Doss was born in Missouri in 1854. She trained as a music teacher at Transylvania University. She met her future husband, ranching entrepreneur William H. Day, in Austin in the late 1870s. Following their marriage in 1879, William and Mabel Doss Day moved onto the Coleman County lands which Day had purchased the previous year. They occupied a small stone house located on Grape Creek to the north of the present ranch headquarters complex. This little structure, which had been built in the mid-1870s by an earlier settler, Bill McAulay, became the nucleus for the Day Ranch for many years to come and continued as the ranch headquarters until the construction of the present house. One of Day's first enterprises was the fencing of a 7500-acre portion of his land with cedar posts and wire from Austin, the wire of a reddish color. The tract became known as the "Red Wire Pasture," and the act of fencing the previously open range was the cause of much disturbance in the area for many years. Day died in 1881 from injuries incurred during a stampede, leaving his widow Mabel Doss Day with their infant child, Willie Mabel Day, and debts and claims to the amount of $117,000. Mrs. Day immediately organized a corporation known as the Day Cattle Ranch Company in an effort to clear her debts. She survived the vagaries of the cattle market, and while she never cleared the ranch of debt completely, she gained a well-earned reputation for business acumen and aggressive ranch management. One of the first problems she encountered was the great flood of 1882, then, beginning in 1883, a fence-cutting war which destroyed over 100 miles of wire along the Red Wire Pasture. Partially through her efforts, the state legislature enacted a law penalizing fence cutting, an act which quickly ended the problem. By 1885 Mrs. Day was running 9,000 head of cattle on the Day Ranch. Heavily in debt and sometimes forced to pay interest as high as 8 per cent, she held tenaciously to her program. In the period of the 1880s, Mabel Day's intelligent control of situations, whatever might arise, gained her the title "Cattle Queen of Texas."
William H. Day was born in Georgia in 1833, moved with his family to Texas in 1847 and assisted with his father's freighting business. He took a degree in civil engineering at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1858, and returned to Texas and accompanied members of his family in a cattle drive to Kansas City. When the Civil War broke out, he was stationed at Camp Colorado in Coleman County; he mustered out in 1862 to assist in a cattle drive to Louisiana. In 1868 he formed a partnership with a brother-in-law, driving a herd to Abilene, Kansas. In the early 1870s he was employed with a St. Louis firm, a packing plan in Denison, Texas, and other activities, engaged chiefly in traveling throughout the Texas livestock-raising regions to assess the post-war status of the cattle industry. His conclusion was that the practice of open range grazing was no longer viable. In the future ranchers would need to own their lands, and with clear title, and those lands would need to be fenced. In 1878 he purchased large tracts of Coleman County land near where he had been stationed during the Civil War. The purchase was from the commissioners of the Fort Bend and Brazoria Counties School Lands. These lands had been held since the 1840s for the school revenues of those southern counties. The ranch he put together in these transactions stretched from Grape Creek on the north, Elm Creek on the east, bordering on the west and south to the Colorado River, approximately 80,000 acres.
In 1889 Mabel Day married Captain J. C. Lea of New Mexico. Lea had moved into the Pecos Valley in 1877 and formed the Lea Cattle Company on a large landholding on which he founded the town of Roswell, New Mexico. Mabel Doss Day Lea left the Day Ranch in the charge of her brother, Will Doss, and moved with her husband to Roswell where together, among other enterprises, in 1891 they created the present-day New Mexico Military Institute. In 1898 drought and blizzards collapsed Lea's ranching endeavors; he died a few years later in Roswell, leaving his wife again in debt. Mabel Day Lea returned to Coleman County sometime after the turn of the century after a long residence in New Mexico; she was present when the new town of Leaday was staked out of a portion of the Day Ranch in December of 1904. She is remembered visiting the site during the construction of the house, and she may have occupied the partially-finished house or maybe the office structure for a brief time, and much work, probably the finishing of the house and re-facing with stucco, was done subsequently. A range of 1904-1909 is probably correct for the building period.
The remainder of Mabel Lea's life was devoted to attempts to finance and refinance the Day Ranch and to pass it on, debt-free, to her daughter, Willie Day. She was appointed as a commissioner to the St. Louis World's Fair where she promoted Coleman County as an ideal destination point for homeseekers, and she tirelessly continued her efforts to attract settlers in the region. In 1904 Willie Day married Tom Padgitt, member of a Dallas family who had a successful saddlery and harness business. Together in the years 1904-1905 the Padgitt couple and Mabel Day Lea began to formulate an ambitious scheme for the subdivision of the Day Ranch. A surveyor was hired to resurvey the ranch into small parcels to attract homesteaders. A new town, named Leaday to honor Mabel Lea's two husbands, was platted in the vicinity of the ranch headquarters at the site of a much-traveled old crossing of the Colorado River. Hotels were constructed at Leaday and at the nearby village of Voss to accommodate the prospective homesteaders when they came to inspect the new homestead sites. The new Day Ranch headquarters complex was laid out at a new location at the edge of a high bluff on the river south of the new Leaday townsite, and the construction of the main house was begun. The structures are located in Block 42, Fort Bend Survey 224. This is land which was patented to the school commissioners of Fort Bend County in 1848 and sold by them to Mabel Day Lea's first husband, William H. Day, in 1878. Day died in 1881 and ownership passed to his widow Mabel Day; following her death, ownership passed to their daughter, Willie Mabel Day Padgitt.
Mabel Doss Day Lea died in April, 1906, and some phases of her development scheme were never realized by her heir, Willie Day Padgitt. In 1907 the Padgitts sold a great portion of the Day Ranch, chiefly the Red Wire and the Bull Hollow Pastures, to the Miller banking family of Belton. The Millers followed the policy established by Mabel Day Lea of subdividing their property, which was now called the Day-Miller Ranch. Thus in the period 1905-1930s the Padgitts and Millers changed the face of their portion of the Coleman County countryside. Dozens of tenant houses were constructed, sometimes connected by new roads with well-built bridges; windmills and tanks were built; the Leaday township began to grow; new schools and churches were constructed; gins and silos were provided. This open and almost unpopulated area became thick with structures and people. However, most homesteaders found it too difficult to practice subsistence farming on land that was more suited to ranching. The failure of cotton markets and the impact of the Depression disintegrated the tenancy policy. Those remaining in the Leaday vicinity turned increasingly to livestock production. Gradually the tenant houses were abandoned, becoming elements in an almost extinct agricultural landscape. The land was eventually repossessed and reintegrated into the original Day-Padgitt and Day-Miller Ranches. By the mid-1950s a configuration of land use and property ownership was resumed comparable to the period when William Day first began to fence in the open range.
In 1979 the Texas Water Commission granted permission to the Colorado River Municipal Water District, and entity based in Big Spring, to construct a large dam on the Colorado River. The site chosen was a location several miles downstream from Leaday, sixteen miles below the confluence of the Colorado and Concho Rivers. Early in the planning stages, a program was developed to address environmental concerns, including the impact of the proposed flood area on prehistoric and historic cultural resources. In 1980-1981 a survey of historical cultural resources was conducted by Freeman and Freeman under contract to Espey, Huston and Associates, a firm of Austin environmental consultants. Subsequently a number of other studies and amplifications of previous studies have been conducted. In early 1988 an Albuquerque, New Mexico, firm of environmental scientists, Mariah Associates, Inc., began further assessment of the area of the flood plain, including various archaeological investigations and assessments. Mariah has also acted in the roll of coordinator of related projects, including this project: the recordation of nineteen endangered historic sites in the confluence area for the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record. The sites were selected from a list compiled under the guidance of the Texas Historical Commission. Construction was finished on the dam in the late summer of 1989. Called the Stacy Dam and Reservoir, the project will inundate approximately 19,200 acres.
Township
Located near the site of Trap Crossing, an old and much-traveled crossing of the Colorado River on the road from Coleman to Fort Concho, the Leaday townsite was laid out in 1904 by local rancher Mabel Doss Day Lea on her great Day Ranch lands in a period when she was planning a subdivision of the ranch into tenant farms. The town was intended to accommodate prospective homesteaders and to serve them once they settled in the vicinity. It satisfied these functions for a number of years until the failure of cotton markets and the impact of the Depression disintegrated the tenant policy. The townsite continued in the ownership of Mabel Day Lea's descendants and the descendants of the Miller family, purchasers of a portion of the Day Ranch. The town was never completed to the extent of its ambitious first plan, and it began to shrink after the first ten years of its life. It was much depleted by the 1950s and abandoned by the late 1980s. Nevertheless, the little town had a strong cultural impact on the surrounding countryside for two generations of farmers and ranchers.
The Leaday townsite occupies land that had been set aside in the 1840s for the Brazoria and Fort Bend Counties' school revenues and was under the directorship of the school commissioners for those counties. It was for many years populated only by roving Indian groups and occasionally an intrepid band of cattle drivers.
The first permanent settler in the vicinity was Rich Coffey who established himself in 1862 on upper Elm Creek between the present-day towns of Leaday and Voss. Coffey's place was called Flat Top Settlement, a group of rough cabins palisaded for defense against the Indians. In 1869 Coffey relocated to another site in the vicinity, this time at the confluence of the Concho and Colorado Rivers, where he established a second fortified compound and continued to run cattle; this new location was about two-and-one-half miles to the west of the future townsite. This second Coffey settlement became the family's permanent homestead and continued in the ownership of Coffey descendants until the late 1980s.
Other early settlers were William J. Hogue, who was situated west of Leaday; and James C. Swift, who located to the east on Elm Creek, on land which became known as Swift's Hole. Yet another early settler, Bill McAulay, settled on Grape Creek a little over a mile to the northwest of Leaday and in the mid-1870s built a small stone house which became the first headquarters of the Day Ranch. The McAulay structure still stands.
These early pioneers established a convenient cattle crossing of the Colorado River immediately southwest of the future townsite. A store was established on a bluff on the Concho County side of the crossing called The Trap, and the place itself took on the name of Trap Crossing. A post office called "Rich Coffey, Texas" was located in the old Trap store. Another store, The Trigger, was located on the opposite bank of the river. Both the Trap and Trigger stores were washed away in the great flood of 1882. Although the crossing changed locations several times in the nineteenth century, the original Trap Crossing was located just to the west of the present-day Leaday Crossing, upriver from the existing house on the Gann Ranch.
In 1878 ranching entrepreneur William H. Day purchased from the Fort Bend County and Brazoria County school commissioners a very large tract which included the site of Leaday, the future townsite lying on the far west boundary of the new Day Ranch, lands which spread to the north, east, and south for several thousand acres. In the early 1870s Day had traveled throughout the Texas livestock-raising regions to assess the post-Civil War status of the cattle industry. From this experience Day had concluded that the practice of open range grazing was no longer viable and that in the future ranchers would have to own their grazing lands. When he moved onto his new Coleman lands, Day made his headquarters at the McAulay stone house and immediately began fencing a 7500-acre portion of his land which became the locally famous Red Wire Pasture. This act precipitated wire-cutting and range wars for several years.
William Day had married Mabel Doss in 1879, and the operation of the Day Ranch was their joint endeavor until his sudden death in 1881. Mabel Doss Day was left with their infant child, Willie Mabel Day, and debts of over one hundred thousand dollars. She immediately began arrangements to refinance the Day Ranch and to consolidate the operations of the ranch, earning a reputation for intelligent management which gained her a great deal of celebrity, both locally and throughout the Texas cattle ranching area. Among other problems she encountered was the great flood of 1882 and in 1883 the beginning of a fence-cutting war which destroyed many miles of wire along the Day Ranch borders. In the 1880s she began to formulate an elaborate plan for subdividing the ranch lands which eventually would be realized by her daughter and son-in-law, including negotiating, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Santa Fe Railroad to run a line through her ranch in the vicinity of the future Leaday townsite. In 1889 Mabel Day remarried; her second husband was Captain J. C. Lea of New Mexico, who had put together a large ranch in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico, a project as ambitious as the Coleman County projects of her first husband. She left a brother in charge of the Day Ranch and moved to New Mexico to the town of Roswell which had been built on Lea's ranch. Together she and Lea founded the present-day New Mexico Military Academy. The Lea Ranch and various Lea-related projects in New Mexico began to suffer set-backs in the 1890s, and when Lea died, his widow found herself once more in debt.
Mabel Day Lea was determined to leave her daughter Willie Day debt-free. She returned to Texas to the Day Ranch in 1904 and continued her earlier scheme of subdivision, including the project which had been gradually germinating of a new town to be located on the ranch near the old Trap Crossing of the Colorado River. As a town-builder she was no doubt drawing on the experience gathered through assisting her second husband at his new town of Roswell. Among other efforts, Mabel Day Lea had herself appointed a commissioner of the St. Louis World's Fair [Louisiana Purchase Exposition, in 1904] where she promoted West Texas, and specifically Coleman County, as an ideal destination point for homesteaders. Willie Day married Tom Padgitt in 1904, and on December 19 of that year Mabel Day Lea and the Padgitts staked out the new town at its present location on high ground near Grape Creek, one mile east of Trap Crossing. A post office was established and named "Leaday" in honor of Mabel Lea's two husbands. Advertisements were placed across the country to attract settlers; plans were made for various buildings at the townsite, and various tenant houses planned for the ranch subdivision. Construction was begun on a new headquarters house for the Day Ranch, interrupted by Mabel Day Lea's death in 1906. In 1907 Willie Day Padgitt and her husband sold a great portion of the Day Ranch, including the Red Wire Pasture, to the Miller banking family of Belton. The Millers followed the policy of subdivision established by Mabel Day Lea and continued by the Padgitts, and together the Padgitts and Millers proceeded with the development of the new town of Leaday. Under the new arrangement, the townsite lands were not held by both families: the eastern and southern portion owned by the Millers, adjacent to their newly-formed Day-Miller Ranch, and the western and northern portion by the Padgitts, bordering on their remaining lands, henceforth called the Day-Padgitt Ranch.
The unsigned town plan was formally platted and the drawing filed at the Coleman County Courthouse, 14 March 1906. The drawing probably pre-dates the 1906 recordation; it may be based on an earlier drawing from 1904, the year Mabel Day Lea and the Padgitts staked out the town; or it may be based on a drawing of an even earlier date, as Mrs. Lea had been considering a scheme for a town on the ranch for some time before her return to the area.
Although never completed to the extent of the ambitious recorded drawing of the plan, the basic configuration of the planned town was carried out, and the general placement of its various elements remained faithful to the original plan. The Leaday plan was based on a strong north-south axis along its major street, Main Street, with cross-streets delineating rows of residential blocks. The southern end of Main Street was planned to connect with the old road over the Trap Crossing of the Colorado River. At this southern fringe of the town was a tract designated "Gin Lot," and directly to the west by Grape Creek, a large tract was set aside for an industrial college campus site, the surrounding grounds to be called "Chatauqua Park." On Main Street, a few blocks north of the river, a block was allotted for a school; and farther north on Main Street, lots set aside for a hotel, a bank, mercantile stores, and other structures.
The plan drawing described a town nine blocks wide and thirteen blocks long on the north-south axis, with wide areas for expansion to the north and east. Only a fraction of this area was ever developed. The college was never realized and most of the residential blocks remained undeveloped. The school was constructed, and the northern end of Main Street developed somewhat with the construction of a church, a group of stores, a blacksmith shop, the hotel, and some residences.
Building construction in Leaday was begun immediately on several structures, a two-story woodframe hotel being finished by May 1905. Mabel Day Lea also had constructed another hotel at the little nearby town of Voss. Both hotels were to provide accommodation for prospective homesteaders as they came to view the new tenant farmsteads opening up on the Day Ranch. The first Leaday mercantile store was built in 1905; soon there were three stores in the new town. As many as fifty houses were constructed, including a dugout on the west side of town. A non-denominational church, built to serve various religious groups, eventually attended mainly by Baptists, was constructed on the east side of Main Street and called Union Church. At the south end of Main Street, on the school grounds site allocated in the original town plan, a school was erected in 1906; a separate auditorium building was constructed about 1917. Other buildings in the first phase of construction were a post office; a blacksmith shop; a livery stable; and a Woodmen of the World hall. A cotton gin was constructed about two hundreds yards south of the present-day Baptist Church; another gin was built by the Padgitts some distance south of Leaday on a bluff over the Colorado River. Excavations were made for a bank in these early years, but the structure was never completed.
In the first years of its development Leaday did a thriving local business, serving rural families who no longer had to make the arduous shopping trips to Coleman or Ballinger over roads which were still rough pasture trails. Soon Leaday had a population of over one hundred people, many of them engaged in town business activities; and many of these families remained in the area long after the town faded away, families such as Allen, Stephenson, Jamison, Walden, Hudson, Pyburn, and Padgitt. The first Leaday store was constructed for a Mr. Moore; other merchants were a Mr. Faircloth, H. W. Wireman, Ike Stephenson. The stores did not stock building lumber, but did provide building supplies such as nails and tar paper; other stock included barbed wire, farm supplies, hardware, fabric, food, clothing and shoes. The first postmaster was H. T. Crenshaw, who drove a one-seated hack daily from Leaday to the little railhead town of Valera to the northeast; he lived in a dugout on the west side of town. Later, the storekeeper Ike Stephenson, who also had a blacksmith shop, served as postmaster; and his son, James Stephenson, was the last Leady postmaster. Members of local families frequently served as teachers at Leaday School.
The local landlords, the Miller and Padgitt families, also played active community roles. One of the older vicinity residents recalled her first memory of a Leaday community gathering, a 1907 Christmas party at Leaday, given to the townspeople by the Padgitts. For the party a silver Christmas tree from Dallas was set up and gifts provided for all the children in the community, a custom continued for some years by both the Miller and Padgitt families.
After a decade, it had become apparent that the growth patten had reached a peak; the plans for various elements set forth in the original town plat had to be abandoned. By 1916, in a special court order, the Padgitts and Millers requested to have much of the townsite lands redescribed as acreage for tax purposes; the request was granted, effectively revoking most of the townsite except lots along Main Street and around the little nucleus of the present-day cluster at the north end of town. The remaining lands went back into the landholding of the Day-Padgitt and Day-Miller Ranches.
When roads began to be paved after World War I and automobiles became more and more common, farmers began taking their cotton to be ginned in the bigger towns where there was a wider selection of mercantile goods and various diversions not available at Leaday. Business at the local Padgitt and Leaday gins began to decline; finally, the Leaday gin was destroyed by a tornado in 1928. The tenant families had found subsistence farming extremely difficult on land more suitable for cattle grazing; droughts and bad cotton markets plagued the local economy; the Depression further depleted the hopes of these hard-working families. Although many of them stuck it out and moved from one tenant establishment to another in anticipation of better production, many of the families moved from the confluence area. Gradually, the tenant farms were repossessed and reintegrated into the Day-Padgitt and Day-Miller Ranches.
The town continued to shrink. The Leaday hotel was dismantled in the 1920s and the lumber was used by Tom Padgitt in the construction of tenant houses on the Day-Padgitt Ranch, but even these houses could not serve their function long and were moved by Padgitt to Coleman for a housing subdivision. By the period 1920s-1930s, Leaday town activity centered around a couple of stores; church and school functions attracted crowds; and rodeos were put on periodically. But the town was definitely on the decline. At the end of World War II Leaday had a much reduced population; the church remained and a few stores. During the 1950s most of the houses were dismantled and very little left. Eventually the old Union Church was taken down and the present-day Baptist Church constructed across Main Street from the old site. In the late 1980s only a few people occupied the town.
Colorado-Concho Confluence Area
Historic American Buildings Survey
National Park Service
Department of the Interior
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