Claude Monroe Ayers

The train Ayers drove belonged to a line chartered on May 26, 1873, as the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway Company, then stalled by that year's financial panic until Grenville M. Dodge took it up in 1881. Crews laid 194 miles of track from Chillicothe to the Canadian River in 1887, the year the first passenger train reached this town. The railheads from Texas and Colorado met at Union Park, New Mexico, 528 miles from Fort Worth, on March 14, 1888, and service to Denver began on April 1. The company's rule was "No settlers, no trains."

What the plaque says

Claude Monroe Ayers Claude Monroe Ayers (1854-1915). Locomotive engineer piloting the first Fort Worth & Denver passenger train to reach here, 1887. Town was given his name. Recorded - 1971.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gem Theatre — 1.9 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.
• Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The two-story house the Goodnights moved into on December 27, 1887, after leaving the JA, with a porch that looks over bison descended from the calves Mary Ann saved.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 15 mi
  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.
• Lighthouse Trail — 20 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.

More markers nearby

• Claude Cemetery — steps away
• Charles H. Roan — steps away
• Early Sheriffs of Armstrong County, 1890-1926 — 1.8 mi
• Armstrong County Jail — 1.8 mi