Cross Plains Review

The town the Review set out to record had gone by other names. Cross Plains got its post office in 1877, after being known as Turkey Creek and as Schleicher. In 1880 it had twenty-five residents, a cotton gin, a gristmill, a wagonmaker and a store. A short-lived Cross Plains Herald, edited by J. D. Grains, came out in 1902. The town incorporated in 1911 with about 600 people. The discovery of oil at the Pioneer and nearby fields in 1925 set off a boom, and the population reached 1,229 in 1940.

What the plaque says

Belmont L. Shields founded the Cross Plains Review in April 1909, when the town was sited on Turkey Creek. He wanted the newspaper established before the railroad came to town, which occurred when the Texas central arrived in 1912 and most businesses and homes moved one mile to the new townsite. After publishing for five years, shields sold the paper to L. P. Henslee, who in 1921 sold the business to three local merchants. The Review has been an important resource for citizens and a unique chronicle, recording community development and such events as the death of writer Robert E. Howard, the 2005 wildfires, and the town's 100th anniversary. As the oldest business in cross plains, the Review is intertwined with the history of the community. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Brownwood State Park — 20 mi
  A CCC park on a reservoir that filled in a single flood before its dam was done, with stone cabins, a hilltop dance pavilion and a grand staircase climbed by dancers arriving by boat.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 21 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 28 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.

More markers nearby

• Home of Robert E. Howard — 0.5 mi
• Fort Mason-Camp Cooper Military Road — 0.7 mi
• Site of Cottonwood Springs — 6.0 mi
• Cottonwood Bank and Post Office — 6.0 mi