Beginning with dugout dances in the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, the flatlands of Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado, and the endless prairies of Nebraska, country dances were made to order for visiting with neighbors, showing off a new dress or a new baby, and perhaps meeting a new beau.
In between the dugout dances and the later barn and grange hall gatherings were platform dances. Many times a platform would be built for a specific occasion, such as Fourth of July or May Day. Then the lumber was taken up and used to build a barn or provide a floor for a sod house.
Often the platforms were no more than boards laid on the ground, although some permanent structures were built. Most have not survived time and the elements, and for the most part, platform dances have gone the way of teams and wagons in the New West.
But in the Panhandle of Texas fiddles still fill the air on summer nights, playing in concert with the sounds of quick-stepping boots and the laughter of neighbors, who drive for miles to the Lipscomb Dance Platform.
The tradition dates back more than a century, when the first wooden platform dance took place in 1885. Thomas Haines brought lumber in from Dodge City, Kansas to use for flooring in his sod house on the barren Texas plains. Before the floor was laid however, cowboys from the nearby Box T Ranch asked Haines to lay the lumber on the ground for a dance.
One hundred and ten years later, in 1995, descendants of those first dancers, along with others who have since settled in Lipscomb County built a raised platform on the prairie. And on the third Saturday of the summer months neighbors gathered to eat, visit, and dance the night away under the Texas stars.
Thanks to Debbie Opdyke for contributing information for this story. For High Plains Public Radio, I’m Skip Mancini.
High Plains History is a production of High Plains Public Radio.
