About the Ranch

Henderson Durham Ranch

Author Carol Henderson’s Great-Grandfather was frontier Texas-born in the year 1860. Full of grit and determination, sixteen year old Thomas Henry (T.H.) Cherryhomes, rode horseback away from a hardscrabble dirt farm, an abusive father, a good mother and six siblings and headed West toward Amarillo. Enduring more than a few hard times: cattle stampedes, floods, ice and snow with only the hard ground to sleep on, he rode the Chisholm Trail. It was there, where he learned how to drive a hard bargain and found his calling: cattle ranching. Saving his money, buying and selling a few head of cattle at a time, he saved his money, worked hard, and got the education of a life time.

Buying his first 1,000 acres of ranch land in 1890, over the decades he built his holdings to 35,000 acres.

At his death in 1943, the ranch was divided among his three grandchildren. And it has reminded under the ownership of T.H. Cherryhomes’ direct descendants for over a century. That land has been host to prehistoric nomadic Indian tribes, cougars, wolves, white tailed deer, migratory birds, humans and beef cattle. Since 1890, the land has been dedicated to cattle ranching and the men and women who have loved and cared for it. Fences added; gravel roads maintained; lakes dug; bridges built; and trespassers discouraged. The 10,000 acres, willed to his granddaughter, Mildred Cherryhomes Durham, is now called the Henderson-Durham Ranch. Its fields have been sowed with winter wheat, its prairie and woodlands, its river bottom and rocky pastures are home to registered Angus cattle, well bred horses, and two families. Today the land is cared for by J. Curtis Henderson, partner, and Cory Pippen, Ranch manager. As far into the future as any of its owners can speculate, this ranch will hold to the plans of its founder: a family owned and operated cattle ranch.