Clay County

From 1875 to 1879 Henrietta was the judicial center of the Panhandle; some people traveled 300 miles for legal help, though most settlers made their own law. Buffalo hunters bought supplies in town and came back with wagonloads of hides and bones, and in 1883 eleven boxcars of bones were shipped east to be ground into fertilizer. The county grew from a few hundred people in 1870 to 5,045 in 1880. Henrietta later supplied mines in Foard County, and the boxing promoter Tex Rickard served for several years as its city marshal.

What the plaque says

Disorganized in 1862 because of Indian raids; reorganized August 4, 1873. Henrietta, headquarters for buffalo hunters until 1878; the first Hereford cattle in Texas were brought to Clay County 1875 from Beecher, Illinois by William S. Ikard. Original county seat Cambridge moved to Henrietta 1874.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 0.7 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 12 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 19 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Kell House Museum — 19 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.

More markers nearby

• Cambridge — 0.6 mi
• Wichita County — 18 mi
• Times Publishing Company — 19 mi
• Kemp Public Library — 19 mi