Canyon Fire Department

The Victoria, the hotel lost in 1910, had been built by Canyon's founder, Lincoln Guy Conner. By the Handbook of Texas account, a volunteer fire department and an electricity and ice plant both came in 1908, and in 1909 the town installed a waterworks and sewer system. On December 2, 1921, another fire destroyed several buildings on the south side of the town square. During the 1920s Canyon paved its streets, added streetlights and piped in natural gas from the Panhandle field north of Amarillo.

What the plaque says

Canyon Fire Department Prior to 1909, volunteers used buckets and homemade ladders to fight fires in Canyon and the surrounding area. The city addressed the need for fire protection by organizing a department and choosing 21 men for duty. The city also obtained a horse-drawn engine with two gasoline-driven pump motors from the Howe Engine Company. Soon, the apparatus was used in 1910 by fire fighters who stopped a blaze at the Victoria, Canyon's largest hotel. Although the hotel burned to the ground, First National Bank and other downtown buildings were saved. The new fire department serviced an immediate area of six hundred square miles, including grass-covered prairies, Palo Duro Canyon, the communities of Canyon, Happy and Umbarger, and nearby rural dwellings. It led to the establishment of Canyon's first system of water works, modernizing the community. Through the years, the department has successfully made adjustments to meet challenges of the area's growth. The establishment of grain elevators, feed yards, and Buffalo Lake Wildlife Refuge, and the passage of trains carrying hazardous materials through Canyon required additional training and equipment. In 1962, the department formed an emergency unit and in 1971, introduced a snorkel unit to fight fires at tall institutional buildings, like those of West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M University). In 1973, Canyon Annual Fire Control School opened, providing training to firefighters throughout the Texas Panhandle. Today, the Canyon Fire Department continues to offer personal protection for residents of this community and rural areas, as well as for thousands of visiting students, educators and tourists. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 0.5 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.
• 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.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• City of Canyon — steps away
• First Baptist Church — steps away
• Randall County — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Canyon — steps away