C. Stuart Johnston

The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum was the first state museum in Texas. Its first building opened on the West Texas campus on April 14, 1933, under an unusual arrangement: the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society owns the collections, while the state, through the university, provides and maintains the buildings. Floyd V. Studer was the museum's first curator of archeology and paleontology. By 1986 five additions held some 1.5 million objects, with major collections in anthropology, geology, paleontology and natural history alongside ranching and Plains Indian material.

What the plaque says

C. Stuart Johnston Born in Belhaven, North Carolina on Dec. 31, 1900, Claud Stuart Johnston began teaching in Oklahoma after graduating from the University of North Carolina. Fieldwork for the University of Oklahoma prepared Johnson for the Earth Science Department chair at West Texas State Teachers College, where from 1934-39, he also taught courses, secured federal relief program funding for projects, and supervised programs with his wife, Margaret (Counts). Materials they collected formed the core of the Paleontology Collection at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. Johnston returned to Oklahoma to finish a doctoral degree, but puzzlingly left for Boston, Massachusetts, where he died weeks later on July 24, 1939. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 2.7 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 13 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 13 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.

More markers nearby

• Randall County — 1.4 mi
• Homesite of W. F. Heller, Pioneer Farmer — 2.0 mi
• Site of Conner Dugout — 2.3 mi
• The Sad Monkey Railroad — 2.5 mi