Texas Venue Directory
Pioneer Hall
Historic community dance hall · Anson
Anson hall serving as the home of the continuing Texas Cowboys’ Christmas Ball and community events.
About this room
Pioneer Hall exists to hold one dance a year. The Texas Cowboys' Christmas Ball started in 1885 at M. G. Rhodes's hotel in Anson and ran until the hotel burned in 1890, then happened irregularly and faded out during Prohibition. Two schoolteachers, Leonora Barrett and Hybernia Grace, revived it in 1934 as a historical reenactment in a high school gym. By then the city had passed an ordinance banning dancing in Anson, but the ball was granted an exemption for its three nights. The reenactment took off, and Pioneer Hall was built in 1940, a WPA project, as a permanent home for it. The dancing ban stayed on the books until 1987. The ball has run every year since, on the Thursday through Saturday before Christmas, with a single pandemic interruption.
History sources checked August 29, 2026.
Things you may not know
- The hall was padlocked 362 days a year: an 8,591-square-foot stone-faced building, a designated state historic site, locked shut except for the three nights the ordinance permitted. Source
- The dancers performed on the White House lawn in 1938, invited by a Washington folklorist after appearing at the National Folk Festival in Chicago in 1937, where they were doing dances no other group performed. Source
- The event is copyrighted. The Anson group incorporated in 1937, named a board of directors, and copyrighted the ball. Source
- There is a dress code and it is specific: women wear skirts, and split skirts, the riding kind, are not allowed. Source
- The whole tradition comes from a poem by a New York traveling salesman. William Lawrence 'Larry' Chittenden attended in 1890, wrote a ballad about it, and later became a rancher north of Anson. Source
- When the ban was repealed the campaign group named itself after the movie. The Footloose Club got the 1933 ordinance replaced and threw a victory dance in Pioneer Hall in October 1987, the first legal public dance in Anson in 54 years: $5 admission, no liquor, band off at midnight, over three hundred people. Source
Venue details
Plan your night
Official sources
Around this room
Culture, craft & learning
Explore nearby rooms
Continue through rooms connected by Anson or the West Texas region.