Dermott

Dermott was named for Pete McDermott, who donated the land for the town and opened a store there in the 1890s, the Handbook of Texas says. It dates the post office to 1902, with William H. Smith as postmaster. Dermott had no depot on the Roscoe, Snyder and Pacific, but trains stopped to load cattle and cotton, and cattle pens were built at its later site on the Santa Fe. Its fortunes rose with the oil boom of 1949 and fell with the 1951 bust, and in 1990 it kept a post office and five people.

What the plaque says

Named for S. P. McDermott, who had crossroads store and was an early postmaster. Began as a community called Dark, 1-1/2 miles northeast. (School in area was named Bookout). Town moved 1909 to the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railroad. It had a hotel and a number of businesses. The Santa Fe was built in 1911, and the competing railroads made this a busy cattle shipping center, with full loading pens. Town moved 1915 to Santa Fe Railroad. The R.S. & P. tracks were taken up in 1942. The town had new population in the late 1940s, during county oil boom. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — 14 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.
• Garza County Historical Museum — 31 mi
  The county museum of Post, C. W. Post's planned town below the Caprock, kept in the stone sanitarium the town opened in 1912 as the best-equipped medical building west of Fort Worth.

More markers nearby

• Home County of Famous Frontiersman J. Wright Mooar — 1.9 mi
• Fluvanna — 7.0 mi
• The Block 97 Controversy — 9.0 mi
• City of Snyder — 11 mi