Claude News

Laura V. Hamner went on from her father's paper to a long public life. She was Claude's postmaster from 1913 to 1921 and Potter County superintendent of education from 1922 to 1938. Years of interviews with old-timers produced Short Grass and Longhorns (1943) and Light 'n Hitch (1958), and The No-Gun Man of Texas (1935) novelized Charles Goodnight, whom she had known around 1892. For three decades she wrote features for the Amarillo Globe-News and lived in Amarillo's Herring Hotel, where she was known informally as "Miss Amarillo." Her papers are at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon.

What the plaque says

Claude News Established as the "Argus," Jan. 1, 1890, in the new railroad town of Claude. Later it merged with "Goodnight News" to become "Claude News." First publisher, W. S. Decker, sold paper to B. F. Hines, who sold to J. H. Hamner, in 1892. His daughter Laura V., later a foremost historian of the early great ranches of Texas Panhandle, edited the paper in this period. About 1913 Hamner sold to Spurgeon and Marvin Bishop. On Jan. 1, 1916, Thos. T. Waggoner, founder of 4 Oklahoma weeklies, bought the "News." After his death, his sons Wm. J. B. and Cecil acquired ownership, in 1950. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gem Theatre — steps away
  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 — 11 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 — 16 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 — 21 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

• Site of Warner Building — steps away
• Armstrong County Jail — steps away
• Early Sheriffs of Armstrong County, 1890-1926 — steps away
• Charles Howard Roan — steps away