Historic Mallet Ranch
Est. 1895

         The Mallet Ranch, from its founding to the present, has followed the arc of most Texas ranches. It has experienced booms and busts, and its owners have fretted over droughts and floods as well as fights in courtrooms. Despite hardships that may have outnumbered successes, the Mallet, headquartered in Hockley County, Texas, perseveres to this day. In 1895, David M. DeVitt, Sr. and John Scharbauer formed a partnership to purchase cattle for grazing.

         In April of 1895, they met a rancher named Theodore Schuster who was interested in selling out his leased 150,000 acre ranch called the "K" Ranch. Because Schuster did not own his acreage, DeVitt and Scharbauer simply bought his cattle, improvements, wells, windmills, tanks, and fences. They also purchased with it, the rights to the brand on the cattle, which assumed the shape of a croquet mallet. Schuster had purchased his cattle herd from the former Mallet Cattle Company and the rights to the Mallet brand. DeVitt and Scharbauer decided to name their new ranching partnership after the brand they had purchased, the Mallet Land and Cattle Company. The operation was incorporated in 1903, the same year DeVitt moved his family to the newly built ranch house, also known as headquarters to homestead the immediate acreage.

         The Mallet Ranch covers sections in four counties: Hockley, Terry, Cochran, and Yoakum, amounting to over 53,000 acres. The DeVitt family was both unique and conventional among Texas stock raisers. David M. DeVitt, Sr., like many before him, was not "born" to be a Texas cattleman. DeVitt began his career as a reporter in Brooklyn, New York, before he decided to leave that path behind to try his luck on the wide-open ranges of West Texas.

         In 1925, W. D. Johnson and his brother J. Lee Johnson, Sr. purchased the shares of Mr. DeVitt's partner in the ranch, from the estate of Andrew Drumm, which amounted to approximately a 40% ownership in the ranch. The Johnson brothers were successful ranchers and business owners in Texas, with their respective ranch holdings still in the ownership of their families today.

         The discovery of oil in May of 1938 on the ranch, and the subsequent drilling of more than a thousand oil wells over the next few decades, transformed the Mallet from a struggling enterprise into one of the most financially successful of such entities. The Mallet Ranch just happened to be located over one of the most profitable oil and gas formations in Texas history, known as the Slaughter field.

         By the time oil was discovered on the ranch, David DeVitt, Sr. had already passed away in 1936. When their father died, his two daughters, Christine DeVitt and Helen DeVitt Jones, along with their mother, Florence, fought to retain control of the Mallet for the family. His son, David DeVitt Jr., who had been managing the ranch in his fathers stead, tragically lost his life in a car accident in October of 1930. Although his two surviving daughters were raised in Fort Worth, both from a young age learned the lesson that the West Texas land and the Mallet Ranch were part of their souls. David DeVitt, Sr. passed down his hardy, independent spirit to his girls.

         Both Christine and Helen became philanthropists, later founding the CH Foundation (chfoundationlubbock.com) and Helen Jones Foundation. From the financial windfall of the discovery of oil on the ranch, Christine and Helen generously reinvested back into the region. The two non-profit organizations founded by the DeVitt sisters have distributed more than $200 million into the community such as Texas Tech University, Lubbock's food bank, the Lubbock art community, the National Ranching Heritage Center, the Mallet Event Center and a long list of other community projects and organizations over the years.