Watkins Reynolds Matthews was the youngest of nine children of Sallie Reynolds and John Matthews. He was born in a bunkhouse on the family ranch in 1899. Watt, as he was best know as lived at Lambshead Ranch all of his life except for the four years at Princeton University where he majored in economics and was a member of the Whig Hall and Tower Club. He was of the graduating class of 1921. Watt served during WWI as a private with the Student Army Training Corps. In 1941 Watt became co manager of Lambshead Ranch and general manager in 1977. Watt was a great supporter of education, preservation and restoration of historical Landmarks. Watt was given many awards over his lifetime but the two that standout are the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Dean of Texas Cattlemen in 1990 and Charles Goodnight Hall of Fame by the National Cutting Horse Association. There were two books written about Watt one was Lambshead Legacy: The Ranch Diary of Watt Matthews, by Watt Matthews published by the Texas A&M University Press and Watt Matthews of Lambshead, by Laura Wilson and David McCullough, published by the Texas Historical Association. Watt's mother Sallie published a book tells what life was like in West Texas from about 1866 to the turn of the century. The name of this publication is Interwoven, A Pioneer Chronicle, by Sallie Reynolds Matthews. Watt Matthews was a Texas Legend!
New York Times
April 21, 1997
Watkins Matthews, Rancher From Bygone Era, Dies at 98
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.
Watkins Reynolds Matthews, a wiry wrangler who spent more than half a century presiding over his family's showcase Texas cattle spread, died on April 13 at the historic Lambshead Ranch, 140 miles west of Fort Worth. He was 98 and the last of his generation in one of the state's oldest and most prominent cattle families.
The 65-square-mile ranch is not especially large by Texas standards -- not much more than twice the size of Manhattan -- but Lambshead was plenty big enough for Watt Matthews. Although he was born in the little town of Albany, a few miles away, he grew up on the ranch, and except for the four years he spent at Princeton University and his regular trips back for reunions of the Class of 1921, he never saw much reason to leave.
After all, his family had been working the ranch since the middle of the last century. Among the first of the region's white settlers, the Matthews and Reynolds clans helped establish the state's signature cattle industry. By the time Mr. Matthews came along, not even the discovery of oil was enough to drive them away.
Despite its name, Lambshead is strictly a cattle operation (give or take some oil wells and some white-tailed deer). It is named for a creek named for Thomas Lambshead, an English-born agent of the famous Butterfield Mail stagecoach line, which once ran from St. Louis to San Francisco.
The ranch traces its history to the 1850's, when the Matthews and Reynolds families struck out from Alabama and Georgia and kept going until they met up at the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, on the edge of Comanche territory.
Once they got together, members of the two families began marrying each other with such furious regularity that Mr. Matthews's mother, Sallie Reynolds Matthews, wrote a book, ''Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle,'' to get them all sorted out.
The book, published in 1936, became a classic of Texas history, as did ''Watt Matthews of Lambshead: A Photographic Study of a Man and His Ranch,'' by Laura C. Wilson, which extended Mr. Matthews's fame after its publication in 1989.
By then, the ranch had become a historic treasure, and Mr. Matthews, who had been running it for a family corporation since the death of his father in 1941, had become an unofficial tourist attraction, a 5-foot-6-inch cowboy who was not only a genial host and a generous supporter of historic preservation, but also a walking, spitting, bourbon-drinking embodiment of a bygone era.
Like his parents before him, he became famous for the house parties that would draw dozens of friends for days at a time, but as a young man he had got so tired of having to give up his bedroom to his parents' guests that he had moved into the bunkhouse. He did not move back to the main house until a couple of years ago, and only then as a concession to the comfort of the nurses hired to take care of him as his health began to fail.
Until then, Mr. Matthews made do with a simple room furnished with a bed, bureau, bootjack and chair, all the comforts needed by a man who spent much of his time on horseback, leading the roundup of the spread's 1,500 Hereford cattle and the annual group of calves at branding time.
For all his devotion to the simple life, Mr. Matthews did not shun all new-fangled conveniences. He experimented with using helicopter-mounted cowboys, but though the choppers proved effective for a while, especially in flushing strays out of the tall grass, the cattle eventually got so accustomed to the satisfying whoosh of the rotors that the cowboys had to go back to their horses.
For all his fame as a stay-at-home, Mr. Matthews did make one trip to Europe some years back, but that was only because, a nephew explained, a grandniece wheedled him into it by piquing his interest in flying on the Concorde.
As the youngest of nine children, Mr. Matthews came by his longevity naturally. All seven who survived infancy lived beyond the age of 85, five of them into their 90's and one to 105.
It was a measure of Mr. Matthew's standing in the community that at his funeral on Tuesday, some 700 mourners made the 13-mile drive from Albany, a town of about 2,000 residents, then followed a 15-mile ranch driveway to the family cemetery at a natural amphitheater, which has long been the site of a high-spirited annual re-enactment of early Texas days, known as Fandangle.
Earlier, there had been a private service at the small stone Presbyterian church built by the family in 1898, a year before Mr. Matthews became the first infant baptized there.
After the public service, Mr. Matthews, dressed in faded jeans and a Levi's jacket, a bandanna around his neck and his sweaty Stetson at his side in a plain wooden coffin, was, as he had requested, buried in the family cemetery next to his oldest sister, Annie Caroline Matthews, who died in 1881.
Mr. Matthews, who never married, is survived by 11 of his 20 nieces and nephews and more great- and grand-nieces and nephews than anyone could be bothered to count last week.
New York Times
April 21, 1997
Watkins Matthews, Rancher From Bygone Era, Dies at 98
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.
Watkins Reynolds Matthews, a wiry wrangler who spent more than half a century presiding over his family's showcase Texas cattle spread, died on April 13 at the historic Lambshead Ranch, 140 miles west of Fort Worth. He was 98 and the last of his generation in one of the state's oldest and most prominent cattle families.
The 65-square-mile ranch is not especially large by Texas standards -- not much more than twice the size of Manhattan -- but Lambshead was plenty big enough for Watt Matthews. Although he was born in the little town of Albany, a few miles away, he grew up on the ranch, and except for the four years he spent at Princeton University and his regular trips back for reunions of the Class of 1921, he never saw much reason to leave.
After all, his family had been working the ranch since the middle of the last century. Among the first of the region's white settlers, the Matthews and Reynolds clans helped establish the state's signature cattle industry. By the time Mr. Matthews came along, not even the discovery of oil was enough to drive them away.
Despite its name, Lambshead is strictly a cattle operation (give or take some oil wells and some white-tailed deer). It is named for a creek named for Thomas Lambshead, an English-born agent of the famous Butterfield Mail stagecoach line, which once ran from St. Louis to San Francisco.
The ranch traces its history to the 1850's, when the Matthews and Reynolds families struck out from Alabama and Georgia and kept going until they met up at the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, on the edge of Comanche territory.
Once they got together, members of the two families began marrying each other with such furious regularity that Mr. Matthews's mother, Sallie Reynolds Matthews, wrote a book, ''Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle,'' to get them all sorted out.
The book, published in 1936, became a classic of Texas history, as did ''Watt Matthews of Lambshead: A Photographic Study of a Man and His Ranch,'' by Laura C. Wilson, which extended Mr. Matthews's fame after its publication in 1989.
By then, the ranch had become a historic treasure, and Mr. Matthews, who had been running it for a family corporation since the death of his father in 1941, had become an unofficial tourist attraction, a 5-foot-6-inch cowboy who was not only a genial host and a generous supporter of historic preservation, but also a walking, spitting, bourbon-drinking embodiment of a bygone era.
Like his parents before him, he became famous for the house parties that would draw dozens of friends for days at a time, but as a young man he had got so tired of having to give up his bedroom to his parents' guests that he had moved into the bunkhouse. He did not move back to the main house until a couple of years ago, and only then as a concession to the comfort of the nurses hired to take care of him as his health began to fail.
Until then, Mr. Matthews made do with a simple room furnished with a bed, bureau, bootjack and chair, all the comforts needed by a man who spent much of his time on horseback, leading the roundup of the spread's 1,500 Hereford cattle and the annual group of calves at branding time.
For all his devotion to the simple life, Mr. Matthews did not shun all new-fangled conveniences. He experimented with using helicopter-mounted cowboys, but though the choppers proved effective for a while, especially in flushing strays out of the tall grass, the cattle eventually got so accustomed to the satisfying whoosh of the rotors that the cowboys had to go back to their horses.
For all his fame as a stay-at-home, Mr. Matthews did make one trip to Europe some years back, but that was only because, a nephew explained, a grandniece wheedled him into it by piquing his interest in flying on the Concorde.
As the youngest of nine children, Mr. Matthews came by his longevity naturally. All seven who survived infancy lived beyond the age of 85, five of them into their 90's and one to 105.
It was a measure of Mr. Matthew's standing in the community that at his funeral on Tuesday, some 700 mourners made the 13-mile drive from Albany, a town of about 2,000 residents, then followed a 15-mile ranch driveway to the family cemetery at a natural amphitheater, which has long been the site of a high-spirited annual re-enactment of early Texas days, known as Fandangle.
Earlier, there had been a private service at the small stone Presbyterian church built by the family in 1898, a year before Mr. Matthews became the first infant baptized there.
After the public service, Mr. Matthews, dressed in faded jeans and a Levi's jacket, a bandanna around his neck and his sweaty Stetson at his side in a plain wooden coffin, was, as he had requested, buried in the family cemetery next to his oldest sister, Annie Caroline Matthews, who died in 1881.
Mr. Matthews, who never married, is survived by 11 of his 20 nieces and nephews and more great- and grand-nieces and nephews than anyone could be bothered to count last week.
Watkins Reynolds Matthews was the youngest of nine children of Sallie Reynolds and John Matthews. He was born in a bunkhouse on the family ranch in 1899. Watt, as he was best know as lived at Lambshead Ranch all of his life except for the four years at Princeton University where he majored in economics and was a member of the Whig Hall and Tower Club. He was of the graduating class of 1921. Watt served during WWI as a private with the Student Army Training Corps. In 1941 Watt became co manager of Lambshead Ranch and general manager in 1977. Watt was a great supporter of education, preservation and restoration of historical Landmarks. Watt was given many awards over his lifetime but the two that standout are the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Dean of Texas Cattlemen in 1990 and Charles Goodnight Hall of Fame by the National Cutting Horse Association. There were two books written about Watt one was Lambshead Legacy: The Ranch Diary of Watt Matthews, by Watt Matthews published by the Texas A&M University Press and Watt Matthews of Lambshead, by Laura Wilson and David McCullough, published by the Texas Historical Association. Watt's mother Sallie published a book tells what life was like in West Texas from about 1866 to the turn of the century. The name of this publication is Interwoven, A Pioneer Chronicle, by Sallie Reynolds Matthews. Watt Matthews was a Texas Legend!
New York Times
April 21, 1997
Watkins Matthews, Rancher From Bygone Era, Dies at 98
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.
Watkins Reynolds Matthews, a wiry wrangler who spent more than half a century presiding over his family's showcase Texas cattle spread, died on April 13 at the historic Lambshead Ranch, 140 miles west of Fort Worth. He was 98 and the last of his generation in one of the state's oldest and most prominent cattle families.
The 65-square-mile ranch is not especially large by Texas standards -- not much more than twice the size of Manhattan -- but Lambshead was plenty big enough for Watt Matthews. Although he was born in the little town of Albany, a few miles away, he grew up on the ranch, and except for the four years he spent at Princeton University and his regular trips back for reunions of the Class of 1921, he never saw much reason to leave.
After all, his family had been working the ranch since the middle of the last century. Among the first of the region's white settlers, the Matthews and Reynolds clans helped establish the state's signature cattle industry. By the time Mr. Matthews came along, not even the discovery of oil was enough to drive them away.
Despite its name, Lambshead is strictly a cattle operation (give or take some oil wells and some white-tailed deer). It is named for a creek named for Thomas Lambshead, an English-born agent of the famous Butterfield Mail stagecoach line, which once ran from St. Louis to San Francisco.
The ranch traces its history to the 1850's, when the Matthews and Reynolds families struck out from Alabama and Georgia and kept going until they met up at the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, on the edge of Comanche territory.
Once they got together, members of the two families began marrying each other with such furious regularity that Mr. Matthews's mother, Sallie Reynolds Matthews, wrote a book, ''Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle,'' to get them all sorted out.
The book, published in 1936, became a classic of Texas history, as did ''Watt Matthews of Lambshead: A Photographic Study of a Man and His Ranch,'' by Laura C. Wilson, which extended Mr. Matthews's fame after its publication in 1989.
By then, the ranch had become a historic treasure, and Mr. Matthews, who had been running it for a family corporation since the death of his father in 1941, had become an unofficial tourist attraction, a 5-foot-6-inch cowboy who was not only a genial host and a generous supporter of historic preservation, but also a walking, spitting, bourbon-drinking embodiment of a bygone era.
Like his parents before him, he became famous for the house parties that would draw dozens of friends for days at a time, but as a young man he had got so tired of having to give up his bedroom to his parents' guests that he had moved into the bunkhouse. He did not move back to the main house until a couple of years ago, and only then as a concession to the comfort of the nurses hired to take care of him as his health began to fail.
Until then, Mr. Matthews made do with a simple room furnished with a bed, bureau, bootjack and chair, all the comforts needed by a man who spent much of his time on horseback, leading the roundup of the spread's 1,500 Hereford cattle and the annual group of calves at branding time.
For all his devotion to the simple life, Mr. Matthews did not shun all new-fangled conveniences. He experimented with using helicopter-mounted cowboys, but though the choppers proved effective for a while, especially in flushing strays out of the tall grass, the cattle eventually got so accustomed to the satisfying whoosh of the rotors that the cowboys had to go back to their horses.
For all his fame as a stay-at-home, Mr. Matthews did make one trip to Europe some years back, but that was only because, a nephew explained, a grandniece wheedled him into it by piquing his interest in flying on the Concorde.
As the youngest of nine children, Mr. Matthews came by his longevity naturally. All seven who survived infancy lived beyond the age of 85, five of them into their 90's and one to 105.
It was a measure of Mr. Matthew's standing in the community that at his funeral on Tuesday, some 700 mourners made the 13-mile drive from Albany, a town of about 2,000 residents, then followed a 15-mile ranch driveway to the family cemetery at a natural amphitheater, which has long been the site of a high-spirited annual re-enactment of early Texas days, known as Fandangle.
Earlier, there had been a private service at the small stone Presbyterian church built by the family in 1898, a year before Mr. Matthews became the first infant baptized there.
After the public service, Mr. Matthews, dressed in faded jeans and a Levi's jacket, a bandanna around his neck and his sweaty Stetson at his side in a plain wooden coffin, was, as he had requested, buried in the family cemetery next to his oldest sister, Annie Caroline Matthews, who died in 1881.
Mr. Matthews, who never married, is survived by 11 of his 20 nieces and nephews and more great- and grand-nieces and nephews than anyone could be bothered to count last week.
New York Times
April 21, 1997
Watkins Matthews, Rancher From Bygone Era, Dies at 98
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.
Watkins Reynolds Matthews, a wiry wrangler who spent more than half a century presiding over his family's showcase Texas cattle spread, died on April 13 at the historic Lambshead Ranch, 140 miles west of Fort Worth. He was 98 and the last of his generation in one of the state's oldest and most prominent cattle families.
The 65-square-mile ranch is not especially large by Texas standards -- not much more than twice the size of Manhattan -- but Lambshead was plenty big enough for Watt Matthews. Although he was born in the little town of Albany, a few miles away, he grew up on the ranch, and except for the four years he spent at Princeton University and his regular trips back for reunions of the Class of 1921, he never saw much reason to leave.
After all, his family had been working the ranch since the middle of the last century. Among the first of the region's white settlers, the Matthews and Reynolds clans helped establish the state's signature cattle industry. By the time Mr. Matthews came along, not even the discovery of oil was enough to drive them away.
Despite its name, Lambshead is strictly a cattle operation (give or take some oil wells and some white-tailed deer). It is named for a creek named for Thomas Lambshead, an English-born agent of the famous Butterfield Mail stagecoach line, which once ran from St. Louis to San Francisco.
The ranch traces its history to the 1850's, when the Matthews and Reynolds families struck out from Alabama and Georgia and kept going until they met up at the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, on the edge of Comanche territory.
Once they got together, members of the two families began marrying each other with such furious regularity that Mr. Matthews's mother, Sallie Reynolds Matthews, wrote a book, ''Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle,'' to get them all sorted out.
The book, published in 1936, became a classic of Texas history, as did ''Watt Matthews of Lambshead: A Photographic Study of a Man and His Ranch,'' by Laura C. Wilson, which extended Mr. Matthews's fame after its publication in 1989.
By then, the ranch had become a historic treasure, and Mr. Matthews, who had been running it for a family corporation since the death of his father in 1941, had become an unofficial tourist attraction, a 5-foot-6-inch cowboy who was not only a genial host and a generous supporter of historic preservation, but also a walking, spitting, bourbon-drinking embodiment of a bygone era.
Like his parents before him, he became famous for the house parties that would draw dozens of friends for days at a time, but as a young man he had got so tired of having to give up his bedroom to his parents' guests that he had moved into the bunkhouse. He did not move back to the main house until a couple of years ago, and only then as a concession to the comfort of the nurses hired to take care of him as his health began to fail.
Until then, Mr. Matthews made do with a simple room furnished with a bed, bureau, bootjack and chair, all the comforts needed by a man who spent much of his time on horseback, leading the roundup of the spread's 1,500 Hereford cattle and the annual group of calves at branding time.
For all his devotion to the simple life, Mr. Matthews did not shun all new-fangled conveniences. He experimented with using helicopter-mounted cowboys, but though the choppers proved effective for a while, especially in flushing strays out of the tall grass, the cattle eventually got so accustomed to the satisfying whoosh of the rotors that the cowboys had to go back to their horses.
For all his fame as a stay-at-home, Mr. Matthews did make one trip to Europe some years back, but that was only because, a nephew explained, a grandniece wheedled him into it by piquing his interest in flying on the Concorde.
As the youngest of nine children, Mr. Matthews came by his longevity naturally. All seven who survived infancy lived beyond the age of 85, five of them into their 90's and one to 105.
It was a measure of Mr. Matthew's standing in the community that at his funeral on Tuesday, some 700 mourners made the 13-mile drive from Albany, a town of about 2,000 residents, then followed a 15-mile ranch driveway to the family cemetery at a natural amphitheater, which has long been the site of a high-spirited annual re-enactment of early Texas days, known as Fandangle.
Earlier, there had been a private service at the small stone Presbyterian church built by the family in 1898, a year before Mr. Matthews became the first infant baptized there.
After the public service, Mr. Matthews, dressed in faded jeans and a Levi's jacket, a bandanna around his neck and his sweaty Stetson at his side in a plain wooden coffin, was, as he had requested, buried in the family cemetery next to his oldest sister, Annie Caroline Matthews, who died in 1881.
Mr. Matthews, who never married, is survived by 11 of his 20 nieces and nephews and more great- and grand-nieces and nephews than anyone could be bothered to count last week.
