Carson County

Carson County's first courthouse doubled as a dance hall. Lonely cowboys came to dances on the top floor of the 1888 building, and a judge short of jurors could send upstairs for a dancing cowboy to fill out a panel; the floor had to be replaced every other year, to the annoyance of taxpayers who did not share in the revelry. A second courthouse, completed in 1909, was later razed, and only its cornerstone remains on the square. The present Modern-style courthouse, designed by J. C. Berry, was finished in 1950 for about $465,000.

What the plaque says

Carson County Created 1876. Organized 1888. Named for Samuel Price Carson, Secretary of State, Republic of Texas. A pioneer county in oil and gas development. Panhandle, county seat, promised main lines of 3 railroads, was by-passed for Amarillo, yet became one of the 4 historic towns in Texas Panhandle.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — steps away
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Gem Theatre — 16 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 23 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 24 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.

More markers nearby

• Carson County — steps away
• Temple Lea Houston — steps away
• Texas Panhandle Pioneers - The Simms Brothers — steps away
• Callaghan Memorial Library — steps away