Palo Duro Goodnight ranch
— where the first ranch in the Panhandle was set.
Not only on a wall.
Palo Duro Goodnight ranch, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“In 1876 Charles Goodnight drove a herd down into Palo Duro Canyon and made the canyon floor his headquarters. Backed by John Adair's Irish capital, the JA Ranch grew to more than a million acres. The same canyon Comanche bands had wintered in for generations became the first ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Goodnight kept a small herd of plains bison alive when most of the species was gone, and their descendants still graze the state's Official Bison Herd today.
The place, in three passes.
In 1876 Charles Goodnight, partnered with the Irish investor John Adair, drove 1,600 head of cattle from Colorado down into Palo Duro Canyon and founded the JA Ranch. The operation eventually covered more than 1.3 million acres across six Panhandle counties. The headquarters sat on the canyon floor in what is now Armstrong County, southeast of present-day Palo Duro Canyon State Park. The JA Ranch is still a working cattle operation, run by descendants of the original Adair family.
Goodnight's wife Mary Ann Goodnight kept a handful of orphaned bison calves in 1878, when the Southern Plains herd was being shot out for hides. Her small herd grew, and its genetics still survive in the Official State of Texas Bison Herd, which moved to Caprock Canyons State Park in 1997. The herd at Caprock now numbers around 200 head and is one of the few directly descended Southern Plains bloodlines in existence.
The JA Ranch itself is private land and not open to the public. The Charles Goodnight Historical Center sits about thirty miles east in Goodnight, Texas, on US Route 287, and preserves the cattleman's 1887 home along with a small bison pasture. Palo Duro Canyon State Park, twelve miles east of Canyon on State Highway 217, covers the upper end of the same canyon where Goodnight wintered cattle, and the CCC-built scenic drive descends to the floor.
