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Like
a battered medieval castle, the empty red brick building stood for
years on the hill overlooking the West
Texas oil town of Rankin
in Upton County.
The building was the old Harlan Hotel, opened for business
at the height of the oil boom as a competitor of the Yates
Hotel, built by Ira Yates, promoter of the famed
Yates Oil Field.
Neither hotel succeeded in running the other out of business - in
fact, both of them eventually closed for lack of business. But only
the Yates still stands.
Rankin, founded
in 1911 after the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway bypassed
the original county seat of Upland,
had no need for a large hotel until Oct. 28, 1926. That's when the
Yates No. 1-A blew in at 400 barrels a day.
By 1928 Rankin
had grown large enough to incorporate as a city. It had a new courthouse,
a new school, a busy bank, and a weekly newspaper that seldom lacked
for news. Soon Rankin also had a 46-room hotel, the three-story
brick and concrete Yates.
The
hotel's grand opening in July 1929 made page-one news in Rankin
and elsewhere around the Permian Basin. The high-rise, "fire-proof"
Yates Hotel billed itself as the
finest hostelry in West
Texas, at least on the left side of San
Angelo.
According to popular legend, the colorful Ira Yates and another
entrepreneur, former Upton County district clerk R.C. Harlan, had
a little falling out over something or other. Typical Texas oil
baron that he was, Harlan built the city's second large hotel and
named it in his honor.
At one time, as many as 10 hotels of sorts did a flourishing business
in Rankin, but
the Harlan and Yates amounted to
the Waldorf Astoria and Ritz of the town once claiming a population
of 10,000.
According to one Rankin
old-timer interviewed in the 1960s, both hotels made a lot of money
for their respective owners - others say one owner did better than
the other. No matter, during the wild and wooly boom days, neither
hotel suffered for clientele.
Another local legend, surely true, is that numerous big oil deals
came to reality on the basis of a handshake in one or the other
of the hotels. And, boot-leg whiskey washing down their gullets
about as fast as oil spewed from the ground they leased, not a few
oilmen lost their proverbial shirts (and more) in friendly poker
games in smoke-filled rooms at the Harlan or Yates.
Also, as more than one Rankin
resident later admitted, numerous other activities not exactly printable
took place in the two hotels.
However, with the great boom soon a thing of the past, and oil crews
moving on to new fields, both hotels started to decline in business
as Rankin dropped
in population during the Great Depression to only 672 residents
by 1940. The emergence of tourist courts - motels to a later generation
- also dealt the Harlan and Yates severe blows.
The Harlan closed its doors first, followed by the Yates a few years
later.
When the Harlan went out of business, an Odessa
man bought it. He, in turn, handed it over to a Midland
wrecking contractor. The company demolished about 50 percent of
the old building and then stopped for reasons local folks never
completely understood.
After 1964, only the first floor of the three-story Harlan survived.
The windows of the vacant building looked out over the one-time
boom town like hollow eyes in a crushed skull. Grass grew in the
once well-trod threshold, and fallen pieces of roofing rattled in
the steady wind that blew across the hill.
The Harlan stood like a bombed-out ruin until 1969. But civilized
societies don't leave their dead lying out in the open, and the
people of Rankin
finally removed the deceased hotel from view. Today, not a brick
remains.
The Yates Hotel, though no longer
accommodating landsmen and wildcatters, is now home to the Rankin
Museum.
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