Archer County Jail

County government in Archer City began in borrowed rooms. When the 1880 election made it the seat, the town's founder, C. B. Hutto, a dentist from South Carolina, gave the county a one-story box house with four small rooms and one large one. The large room served as courtroom and county attorney's office, while the clerk, sheriff, tax collector, surveyor and treasurer each took a smaller room. Hutto also gave the lot for the county's first jail. Many early officials were Republicans from old Union states such as Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, elected with Democratic votes on ability.

What the plaque says

By 1909 Archer County had outgrown its original jail, a 16-foot square frame building. Construction on this larger facility was completed in Sept. 1910. The sandstone structure was designed with living quarters for the sheriff and his family on the ground floor. The second and third floors had cells and a hanging gallows which was never used. The first prisoner held in this jail was arrested for stealing a horse. More than 8,000 prisoners were jailed here until the county opened a new facility in 1974. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Royal Theater — steps away
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 18 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Kell House Museum — 23 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 23 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.

More markers nearby

• A Jesse James Hideout — steps away
• Camp Cureton, C.S.A. — steps away
• Archer County Discovery Well — steps away
• Archer City Methodist Church — steps away