Community of Clyde

Robert Clyde's railroad crew was large; local accounts, the Handbook of Texas says, put it at 5,000 workers, many of them Chinese. In 1883 several Irish families came to Clyde from Pennsylvania, and about the same time a group of Portuguese arrived by rail and formed a colony nearby, abandoned around 1900. By 1925 Clyde had forty-five businesses, among them five grocery stores and two banks. The Bankhead Highway came through in 1924, making trips to Abilene faster and slowing Clyde's own growth. By 1980 it was the largest town in the county.

What the plaque says

Settlers began moving to this area when the Texas and Pacific Railroad completed its line in December 1880. Many located near the commissary of railroad crew foreman Robert Clyde, for whom the town is named. A post office was established in 1881. The schoolhouse was used for church meetings and local court proceedings. A sign on the water tower in 1920 proclaimed Clyde "The California of Texas" because of its fertile soil and shallow water table. On three separate occasions, in 1895, 1938, and 1950, destructive tornadoes have hit the community. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 14 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 20 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 21 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Old Jail Art Center — 25 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Baird — 5.7 mi
• Camp Pecan, C.S.A. — 5.9 mi
• Callahan County — 5.9 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Baird — 5.9 mi