Cambridge

Cambridge was for a time Clay County's main community and retail center. It received postal service in 1875, and St. Mary's Catholic Church was built there about 1879. When the Fort Worth and Denver tracks went through Henrietta in July 1882, many Cambridge residents and businesses moved, and the post office closed; a second railroad, the Katy, also passed it by, and the last residents left. Henrietta, meanwhile, had 2,100 people by 1890, with a 400-seat opera house, two banks, a cigar maker and two newspapers. By 1991 only a cemetery marked Cambridge.

What the plaque says

(Early County Seat) Founded 1860, but abandoned to marauding Indians, 1863. Settlers returned in 1870 and installed a grist mill. Developers surveyed townsite in 1874; school, church, shops, and hotel were built. Post office was established and Fort Sill-Fort Richardson military telegraph line came through in 1876. First newspaper in county was founded there. Rapid growth halted when town was bypassed by Fort Worth and Denver Railroad in 1882. By then place was known as Henrietta -- the name retained when county seat was moved here. Cambridge Cemetery still exists (a mile north of historic townsite). (1971) Incise in base: Erected by Clay County Historic Survey Committee, 1971.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — steps away
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 12 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.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 18 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.
• Kell House Museum — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• Clay County — 0.6 mi
• Wichita County — 17 mi
• Times Publishing Company — 18 mi
• Kemp Public Library — 18 mi