An early morning photo shoot yesterday at Waco Bend Ranch in Palo Pinto County gave me an excuse to stop in Mineral Wells, 25 miles northwest of Weatherford, Texas, and photograph the Baker Hotel.
Weatherford is famous for its cutting horse ranches and its peaches, but Mineral Wells’ original settlers included Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, who established ranches in this lush cross-timbers area in the 1850s.
Following the Civil War, when Texas teemed with longhorns, Goodnight and Loving joined forces to herd cattle west to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The trail became famous as the Goodnight-Loving Trail and the two cattlemen’s adventures inspired Larry McMurtry’s famous novel Lonesome Dove
The town of Mineral Wells (population 16,000) is dominated, as it has been since 1929, by the Baker Hotel. With its boarded doors and broken windows, the once grand 14-floor, 450-room resort hotel looks as out of place in this West Texas hamlet as Cowboys Stadium would on Cape Cod. But the “Grand Lady of Mineral Wells” was built to take advantage of a craze for the town’s famed mineral waters, and it drew the well-heeled and famous for more than 25 years. Will Rogers, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Judy Garland were among celebrities and guests who danced to big bands such as Paul Whiteman, Lawrence Welk, and Guy Lombardo, in the hotel’s ballroom.
The Baker closed in 1972, much past its prime. But some still hope to see it revived to its former glory. The Goodnight-Loving Trail has slipped past memory, into history, but cattle and horses are still a vital part of Mineral Wells and Palo Pinto County.