City of Dumas

Dumas grew fast once oil and gas came in 1926 and the North Plains and Santa Fe arrived in 1931. Despite the Dust Bowl it had 2,500 people by 1935, and wartime demand for petroleum took it from 2,117 in 1940 to 6,127 in 1950. Its worst disaster came on July 29, 1956, when a fire at the Shamrock-McKee plant near town killed nine plant employees and ten firemen. The town's name also traveled in a song: Phil Baxter wrote I'm a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas after a night there, and Phil Harris recorded it in the 1940s.

What the plaque says

In 1891, Louis Dumas and J. R. Wheat formed the Panhandle Townsite Company to develop and promote a community they named Dumas. A post office was established the same year, and in 1892 Dumas was elected the seat of Moore County government. A mercantile store opened in 1894, and the First State Bank was organized in 1908. The dry, arid land surrounding Dumas attracted few newcomers, and the population remained sparse until oil was discovered in 1927. The town's history is a good reflection of life in the Texas Panhandle. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Window on the Plains Museum — 1.0 mi
  Moore County's free museum on the Dumas highway, telling an industrial Panhandle of zinc smelters, helium and gas plants alongside the farm and ranch rooms.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 24 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 26 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.
• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 28 mi
  The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.

More markers nearby

• Moore County Courthouse — steps away
• Geological Riches of Moore County — 1.1 mi
• Site of Historic Drift Fence — 1.1 mi
• Moore County — 6.8 mi