Results by title

How wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture of North Texas.

In the national imaginary, America’s amber fields of grain lie in the country’s center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex.

In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region’s cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat’s very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas.

This comprehensive and compact volume is a field guide to all the native and naturalized trees of the north Texas zone, including the Blackland Prairies, the Cross Timbers region, and both the Rolling and High Plains. Here too is detailed information on the many varieties of trees introduced into the Dallas-Fort Worth region over the twentieth century.

Drawn from Robert A. Vines' monumental Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of the Southwest (University of Texas Press, 1960), the field guide contains full descriptions of every tree in the area. Its convenient organization makes Trees of North Texas ideal to take into the field for on-the-spot identification, and virtually every description is accompanied by a finely executed illustration. Fascinating bits of history and lore enliven the descriptions throughout.