SUMMERFIELD, TEXAS (Castro County). Summerfield is at the junction of U.S. Highway 60 and Farm Road 1057, eighteen miles northwest of Dimmitt in northwestern Castro County. It was established in the late 1890s on the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway and was known as Boom until 1907, when postal authorities found that there was already a town in Texas by that name. The site was then renamed in honor of John S. Summerfield. As a surveyor for the Gunter and Munson firm in Sherman during the 1880s, Summerfield had helped mark the boundaries of the XIT Ranch,qv which enclosed the townsite. A school was held in the dugoutqv home of E. C. Millet until 1902, when a one-room schoolhouse was built. Because of the unusual location of the community near the junction of three counties, the first teacher, Miss Lenna Green, taught in Castro County, boarded in Parmer County, and drew her salary from Deaf Smith County. In 1902 the International Land Company of Chicago bought the town section and offered a building site plus some money to any congregation that would build a church. The Baptists agreed to the task, but the Methodists aided in the project. For years the building was used by several communions for individual church services and a union Sunday school. The first post office was in the home of N. A. Laughlin, whose wife acted as postmistress. Summerfield endured prairie fires, blizzards, and drought to become a local market for the ranches and farms along Castro Creek. A brick school building with three classrooms and an auditorium was erected in 1921. By 1940 the community had a general store and a population of seventy-five. After the school district was consolidated with that of Hereford in 1947, the schoolhouse was turned into a community center. Though Summerfield never had the boom that its founders hoped for, in 1986 it had a Baptist church, a post office, the community building, two stores, and a grain elevator. In 1990 it reported a population of sixty. The population remained the same in 2000.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Castro County Historical Commission, Castro County, 1891-1981 (Dallas: Taylor, 1981). Deaf Smith County: The Land and Its People (Hereford, Texas: Deaf Smith County Historical Society, 1982). Kathleen E. and Clifton R. St. Clair, eds., Little Towns of Texas (Jacksonville, Texas: Jayroe Graphic Arts, 1982).
H. Allen Anderson
