Colorado City Standpipe

Colorado City's water problem came first. In the early years water was hauled to town from Seven Wells and other sources and sold for fifty cents a barrel. The town was a new cattle-shipping center then, home to 200 to 300 people by 1882, and its population was estimated as high as 6,000 in 1884 and 1885. The waterworks bonds of 1884 paid for the standpipe and the mains. The boom slowed anyway after the drought of 1885 and 1886, and the town had to find another living.

What the plaque says

Colorado City Standpipe In response to the need for a water supply system for Colorado, as this town was then known, the city's governing body issued waterwork bonds in 1884. The bond money was used to build this standpipe and to lay mains through which the city's water supply could run. The 90-foot steel standpipe was erected in 1884 by Riter and Conley of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and continues in use as a storage facility for emergency water needs. The development of the city's water services was a major factor in the town's survival in the dry West Texas area. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heart of West Texas Museum — 1.5 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 6.7 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.
• Scurry County Museum — 21 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 22 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.

More markers nearby

• William Marion Green — 0.6 mi
• R.C. (Dick) Ware — 0.7 mi
• Comanche Village Massacre — 1.1 mi
• Ruddick Park — 1.1 mi