Aaron S. Mangum

Mangum, Oklahoma, once lay inside Texas. Its city history says the town was named for A. S. Mangum, who owned the land where it was founded in 1882, a tract granted by the State of Texas. Henry Clay Sweet started the community in what was then Old Greer County in the Texas panhandle, and the Great Western Cattle Trail passed nearby from 1876. Greer County was awarded to Oklahoma in 1896, and the town entered the state in 1907. Cowboys nicknamed it Tin City for the tin cans flattened and nailed over its wooden sidewalks.

What the plaque says

Aaron S. Mangum (September 3, 1812 - August 10, 1884) South Carolinian Aaron Mangum came to Texas with a Georgia battalion in 1835 and served under Colonel James Fannin at Goliad. Mangum took ill during an expeditionary mission and fatefully avoided death at the Goliad Massacre. He married Leonora Snively in 1836 and together they lived in Mississippi and Georgia before moving here to Grayson County about 1869. After his death the town of Mangum, Oklahoma, was named in his honor. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 9.4 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.
• Eisenhower State Park — 12 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 24 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.

More markers nearby

• Olive Ann Oatman Fairchild — steps away
• The Rev. John Silliman Moore — steps away
• Jesse P. Loving — steps away
• Tom Randolph — steps away