Roger Estlack

A Donley County tradition continues this weekend as Hedley hosts the 67th annual Cotton Festival on Friday and Saturday, October 12 and 13.

The Hedley Lioness Club will get things going Friday with a Chili & Stew Supper at 5 p.m. The club will also be selling chances on a quilt.

Hedley’s Athletic Department will host Bingo on Friday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. and Saturday starting at 8 a.m. in the Senior Citizens building.

Also Friday night at 7:00 p.m., a Hootenanny will be held at the Lions’ Den featuring Johnnie Woodard.

Saturday’s events begin with the Hedley Fire Department’s Pancake Breakfast from 6 to 9:30 a.m. at the First Baptist Church. The Rowe Cemetery Association will hold a bake sale at Moffitt Hardware.

At 11:00 a.m., the Lions Club will host a catered BBQ dinner, and the Senior Citizens will be serving hamburgers. Also, Saturday at 10 a.m. the Hedley Senior Citizens will host a cake walk.

The Kiddie Parade will be held at 2 p.m., followed by the Community Parade. After the parade, the School Reunion is at the school at 3:00 p.m.

Saturday evening, the Hedley Volunteer Fire Department will hold a barbecue dinner from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. at the First Baptist Church. The festival will close out with entertainment and drawings at the Lions’ Den Saturday night starting at 6 p.m., including the annual drawing for a bale of cotton donated by Donley County Gin and K. Huddleston Sales.

The Donley County Health Fair will be held Thursday, October 25, at the Bairfield Activity Center from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

The annual event features information from different health care providers as well as flu shots, blood screenings, blood pressure checks, and more.

For more information or to reserve a booth, call the Donley County Extension Office at 874-2141.

State Representative Ken King (R-Canadian) will be in Clarendon next week as he tours House District 88 to talk about the upcoming 86th Regular Legislative Session.

Rep. King will be at the Bairfield Activity Center on Wednesday, October 17, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. and will solicit feedback from constituents on issues of vital importance to them and their communities.

“Before beginning another legislative session, it is important that I receive input and ideas from the constituents of District 88 to help me effectively represent and advocate for our community,” King said.

The creative talents of junior high and high school students have been uncorked over the last few weeks thanks to an after-school program sponsored by Clarendon’s Les Beaux Arts Club.

For five years now, the women’s organization established in 1927 has worked to establish a volunteer art curriculum in the Clarendon public school system in conjunction with the club’s annual arts festival. Club members work with elementary students, and a volunteer professional artist has worked with older students. But this year, the club went a step further and employed a professional artist to help guide about two dozen students.

Project organizer Chriss Clifford had worked with Rafael Cañizares-Yunez in 2012 as she led a restoration of the St. Mary’s Catholic Church at Umbarger. Aware of his background and his talents, Clifford reached out to the Columbian-born artist who now calls Amarillo home.

With Rafael’s help, the club has taken its ACE (Art Cultivates Enlightenment) Program to a new level, offering a seven-week after-school class that helps students working with different kinds of art.

“We have at least two to three volunteers at each class, and the club provided the funding,” Clifford said. “This year, the high school also provided some of the art supplies. They had some money for it in the budget because last year they had a teacher doing both visual and performing arts.”

The program accepted 25 students who applied for the ACE program. Of those, about 18 or 19 show up regularly due to scheduling conflicts.

The class meets Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon’s in the old home economics room adjacent to the Old Gym. Katherine Williams is a Les Beaux member who has been volunteering since this year’s program began in August.

“It’s been fun watching them create,” Williams said. “They are working in all mediums, and Rafael has taught them wonderful lessons about mixing colors, lines, and depth.”

Williams said the club purchased some of the supplies the students are using, other supplies were donated, and still others are left over from a high school art class that was being taught last year by the school’s previous drama teacher before she left the school.

Sixth grader Serenity Burnett last week was putting the finishing touches on a painting of a horse at night, a piece she calls “Night Mare.”

“This is my biggest piece so far; It’s my favorite,” she said. “I love to do art. If we had a regular art class in school, that would be awesome.”

Jami McConnell is a freshman who also wishes that art was a regular class at Clarendon ISD. She was working on a piece looking at the two sides of the same person, a painting that she is calling “Split World.”

“Rafael lets us do what we want then he explains it and teaches us how to make it better,” McConnell said. “He teaches us how to make new colors and how to change colors.”

Eighth grader Nathan Estlack agrees with McConnell that mixing colors has been one of the most interesting aspects of the class.

“You can take three colors and make an infinite number of colors,” Estlack said.
Mycah Woodard is a ninth grader who finds art relaxing and also wishes it was a regular class.

“I think it’s pretty cool, and I think it’s helped a lot of people,” Woodard said. “It gives me piece of mind.”

Rafael says his class is individually based and focuses on the elements and principals of design.

“I try to allow them to discover something about the creative process,” he said. “We question what they did and critique each other.”

With such a diverse age group, Rafael has to work with a wide range of talents – some students have been doing art for years while others are just beginning – as well as a wide range of confidence.

“My job is to encourage them to build on success and support them where they are at,” he said.

Students can become frustrated while working on their art as they overcome challenges to get their work just right and to to push through creative blocks, but Rafael says persisting through those moments can teach students a lot about life.

“The lessons you learn through the creative process apply everywhere, whether they become artists or scientists or entrepreneurs,” he said.

Rafael gives all the credit for the program to the arts club.

“They are the ones that have made this happen and have volunteered their time,” he said.

Williams said part of the agreement the club made with the kids who enrolled in the art project was that they must enter two of their pieces in the annual Arts Festival, which will be held October 27 and 28. One piece will just be in the gallery, but the other piece will be sold to help raise funds for the club and support future projects. Students can also enter other pieces in the show for a small fee.

Rafael’s art class will come to a close on October 17, but Clifford said the members of Les Beaux Arts Club continue to hold out hope that the school will see fit and find it in the budget to create a permanent art program at the school.

“We anticipate that teachers and administrators will see a difference in these students’ academic performance as a result of their exposure to the arts,” Clifford said. “We also believe that to have a well-rounded student, the arts need to be a part of the curriculum.”

Demolition continues this week on what was once a bustling place of activity for Clarendon residents – the Antro Hotel.

Initial plans were to raze the three story building entirely to the ground, but that scope of work has now changed with the first story walls to be left intact for future use as an outdoor park or entertainment space.

The site of the hotel has a long history dating back to the establishment of New Clarendon in 1887 when the railroad came through. The first building on that location was also a hotel. The Windsor Hotel, with guest rooms upstairs and a saloon downstairs, was operated by John T. Nugent for just a few years before the building burned to the ground in 1892.

Two other buildings that later occupied the same property were destroyed in 1921 when what was described as a “freak storm” hit the central business district and left several properties severely damaged.
Then in 1926 work got underway on what would become known as the Antro Hotel. When it opened in early 1927, The Clarendon News proclaimed: “The Antro Hotel stands as a permanent and appropriate memorial to the citizenship of the man for whom it was named, G.W. Antrobus.”

Antrobus was called the oldest settler of New Clarendon because he had camped on the present site of the town before it moved from the settlement’s original location on the Salt Fork. Antrobus first came to Donley County in 1884 and stayed several years, building ranch houses, corrals, and fences. Later, he returned to Wichita Falls. But he moved back in 1887 and entered the lumber business, eventually establishing what became Watson & Antrobus with its first store being on the site of the future hotel.

The opening of the Antro was met with great success. Designed by Amarillo architect Guy Carlander, the Antro consisted of 42 rooms with a lobby and coffee shop on first floor and a basement under the north half that was the site of numerous banquets throughout the years. The hotel rooms sold out several times in its first year of operation, and many clubs, including the Lions Club, made the Antro basement their home.

The hotel was originally managed by Col. E.O. Thompson of Amarillo, who also operated the famous Herring Hotel in that city. That agreement lasted only a few years before the Antrobus family resumed primary control of the business.

The first electric signs for the hotel and coffee shop were installed in 1927, although the original sign was not the one on the building at the time demolition started last week. The Watson & Antrobus hardware business moved into the south side of the building in 1932 and remained there 14 years.

In 1946, the hotel sold to Fletcher Curry, and the property was renamed the Donley Hotel. Likely about that time is when the sign was changed to the one that was still present up until last week. At one point in 1954, The Donley County Leader reported that Curry had installed a large neon sign – 48 feet by 24 feet – that said “HOTEL” about 16 feet above the roof.

It’s not certain the exact date the hotel closed. By the early 1970s it was being referred to in news articles as “the old Donley Hotel” and the was site of rummage sales. By 1977, it had come under the ownership of Clyde Peabody and was sometimes referred to as the Peabody Hotel, even though it never operated as such. In March of that year, G.W. Estlack, who owned the neighboring print shop, met with the city about condemning the building. He asked the Board of Aldermen to notify Peabody to put the building in a reasonable state of repair, possibly reduced to a one-story building, as it was a fire hazard.

By 1982, the city and then Mayor Shirley Clifford was pressuring Peabody to do something with the building. By 1989, Peabody had turned the property over to the city along with some bond money, which was put to use to “mitigate the nuisance” presented by the dilapidated roof and upper floors. The exterior walls remained sound, and there was still some hope that something might come of the building, but the removal of the roof at that time as likely was the ultimate death sentence for the Antro.

Ten years later, the city was again looking at razing the building, but when the demolition bid came in too high, the aldermen put the property up for public bid. Russell Keown purchased the property for $5, and then spent many years trying to keep people out of the building before he donated it to the Clarendon Economic Development Corporation four years ago.

The CEDC sealed up the building from public entrance and engaged an engineer to draw up plans for the gutting of the hotel building and subsequent bracing of the exterior walls, but cost estimates caused that project to be put on hold. Time ran out for the Antro on July 29, 2018, when another freak storm hit downtown and a straight-line north wind clocked at 84 miles per hour pushed much of the north wall into the building’s interior.

Today, several architectural elements of the building are being salvaged during the demolition of the Antro Hotel, including the sign that hung on the front for so many years. The CEDC Monday night discussed the possibility of bringing in an architect to come up with a plan to re-use those elements and make the property an active part of downtown for the future.

The Clarendon College Men’s Rodeo team were the champions at both the Eastern New Mexico University Rodeo and the Sul Ross Rodeo the past two weekends.

These two wins are the first team championships in the program’s history.

At ENMU, Tegan Smith placed first and Riggin Smith placed third in Saddle Bronc Riding, and Brody Rankin and Casey McCleskey placed third in Team Roping. They were the #1 team with 345 points. Tarleton placed 2nd as a team with 335 points.

At Sul Ross, Tegan Smith won the bull riding, 3rd in the Saddle Bronc riding and was the All-Around Champion Cowboy. Riggin Smith won the Saddle Bronc Riding and Brody Rankin was 2nd in the Tie Down Roping. CC was the first placed team with 610 points, and Cisco College placed 2nd with 470 points.

The Rodeo Team will compete at Vernon College Rodeo Oct. 4-6.