Imagining Skyscrapers in a Wheat Field: Regionalism and Cold War Development in the Texas High Plains

Abstract:In the 1950s, Amarillo, Texas, was a sprawling, Cold War boomtown with an Air Force base and nuclear-weapons assembly plant. In this context, John Lawton McCarty, a legendary newspaperman and regional historian who first became famous for the "Last Man's Club" he formed during the Dust Bowl, purchased a square-mile section of land on the edge of the city, which he intended to turn into a mixed-use commercial and real-estate development called Estateland Center. Most of this ambitious development was never built, in large part because of two lawsuits that brought McCarty's budding real-estate empire crashing down by 1960. Nevertheless, the story of Estateland and McCarty's frontier-themed boosterism shows how the unbuilt environment of a Great Plains city illuminates deeper meanings of regional development. McCarty and his fellow boosters in the mid-twentieth-century Texas High Plains looked backward to frontier yesterdays while looking forward to urban tomorrows, envisioning nearly unchecked growth based on exploitation of land and underground water resources.