Dad's Corner

The Handbook of Texas gives the name a different source than the plaque does: it says the settlement, born in the oil boom of the early 1920s, was named for oilman C. M. 'Dad' Joiner. The country around it was crowded with wells; by 1926 more than 1,400 had been drilled near Holliday, which had become an oilfield supply and manufacturing center with about sixty businesses. Dad's Corner never grew large. By the mid-1930s it had one rated business and fifty residents, and by the mid-1960s, when the last count was made, only twenty.

What the plaque says

The result of a 1923 oil boom, development of a town at this site included some twenty-two businesses, including a food stand operated by a man with the nickname "Dad", which provided a name for the settlement. Located at this crossroads were a hotel, cafe, school, stores, ice house, and more. Early residents remembered tales of lawlessness and Texas Ranger patrols. The county's largest oil field was one-half mile southeast, and many area residents changed from cowboys to oil field workers. After the boom, Dad's Corner became a ghost town. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Royal Theater — 11 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Kell House Museum — 16 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.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 16 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.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Geraldine — 2.7 mi
• First Methodist Church of Holliday — 4.6 mi
• Maggie and Herod "Pap" Simpson — 4.7 mi
• Captain John Holliday — 6.0 mi