"Nat Fleming's Cow Lot, a Western-wear store in Wichita Falls, wasn't exactly the kind of place where you'd hang your hat.
At The Cow Lot, you nailed it to the rafters.
And now, after 54 years in business, Fleming has closed his store and he's got more than 500 hats to pry off his walls and move to a downtown museum. "Nat's Hats," as they are now called, are destined for the Museum of North Texas.
They were wanted at other places; according to the Wichita Falls Times Record News, institutions from Oklahoma City to Lubbock "were hungry for his collection."
Nat and his wife, Tawana, decided to leave the collection at home in Wichita Falls.
"Oh, it's a wonderful story," said Bobbi Braun, with the Museum of North Texas. "We found out his store was closing when a story came out in the Wichita Falls paper, and I wrote to him immediately. We wanted those hats."
The Cow Lot was certainly an institution in the North Texas city. People could buy Western wear at other places, Braun said, but for those who were really particular about what they wore, only The Cow Lot would do.
It was as though Fleming's store motto was gospel. At the end of his local television ads, Fleming would always add, "You can tell by looking if it came from The Cow Lot."
But the tiny, crowded store on the city's south side was no more an institution that Fleming himself. His slow country drawl was well-known in the area. Fleming was also a local country-Western band leader who hosted his own afternoon variety program, The Nat Fleming Show, on local television from 1953 through the early 1960s. His program ended, but his TV commercials remained a mainstay of local color and lore.
Now The Cow Lot is closed. The doors were locked just before Christmas, and the hats still hang there in a lonely display.
The museum is working hard to get an exhibit area ready, but it is going to take a lot of money and there isn't much time. "We've been promised the hats and we're going to make space for them," Braun said, "but we've got other things going on at the same time. Our next exhibit is a quilt display and we're getting ready for that."
In the meantime, the museum has launched a campaign to raise $40,000 to build a large "Western Room," one entire wall of which will be devoted to the hats. "In the beginning, we just sent out letters to our members," she said of the museum's fundraising efforts. "Once we get the quilt display up and going, we'll start contacting some people with deeper pockets."
The hats, she says, are more than just a decorative display. Braun has counted 511 of them in all, and many are from prominent ranchers and businesspeople from North Texas. There are felt hats from ranch bosses, crushed straws from ranch hands. They represent a quirky Who's Who of Wichita Falls; they represent an important timeline in the area's development.
"It all started when Nat first opened his store 54 years ago," Braun said. "His brother sent him a big 10-gallon hat -- one of those great big ones with a big brim and tall crown -- to celebrate the opening. It was a joke, but it caught on. As time passed by, when someone bought a new hat, they nailed their old one to the rafters."
The hats will be a centerpiece of the new Western Room at the museum, but there will be other items as well. "We already have a Joe Bidwell saddle," Braun said. Bidwell is a well-known ranch family name in Wichita Falls. "We have a chuck box, and we've been promised a huge barbed-wire collection. We also have the 'Waggoner Horse Hoof.'"
The hoof is another part of Wichita Falls lore dating to the 1880s. Braun said the story is that a couple of bank robbers stole a horse from the Waggoner Ranch in Vernon on the way to rob a bank in Wichita Falls. When they came out of the bank, the sheriff saw them and opened fire. He missed the bank robbers but hit the horse. A Waggoner Ranch foreman kept one of the horse's hooves as a souvenir. The hoof will share space with the hats."
Tags:
Bookmarks:
0 comments:
Post a Comment