Duffy's Peak

The peak rises 2,710 feet above sea level, about 100 feet above State Highway 207, on highly erodible ground where shallow silt loams carry mesquite and grass. People knew this country long before Hays. Clovis spearheads have been found in Garza County, archeologists uncovered the sixteen-foot tusk of an imperial mammoth here in 1934, and a type of arrowpoint used by hunters before A.D. 1500 was found in the county in the 1960s and named the Garza point. From about 1700 to the 1870s Kiowas and Comanches of the Wanderers band hunted the area.

What the plaque says

Duffy's Peak Height so prominent it was Garza County's earliest bench mark, designated by peg-legged surveyor Jasper Hays, who in 1877-1878 was marking bounds of Llano Ranch, first property to be occupied by settlers in county. Hays began at a corner established for the Houston and Great Northern Railroad Company near the White River in Crosby County, and shot west toward this peak. Tradition has it that a member of Hays' crew died and was buried near this peak, which was afterward named for him. Local heights named for natural wonders include "The Ice Cream Cones," "Cow Head Mesa," "Indian Head Point," and "The Chimneys," Other interesting uplands are "Two Bush Hill," "The Devil's Breakfast Table," "Needlepoint Peak," and "Buffalo Point." Two balanced rocks known to early settlers have now disappeared because of wind and weather erosion. Duffy's Peak, like most of the scenic formations, is sandstone, clay and sand. It still figures in local land transactions, as Hays' original notes (unearthed from Mason jars he buried on the peak) formed basis for later surveys-- including those of A. L. Marhoff in 1906, establishing boundaries for the farm colony of "Cereal King" C. W. Post. 1969

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Garza County Historical Museum — 11 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.
• Slaton Harvey House — 16 mi
  A 1912 Santa Fe Harvey House in the railroad town of Slaton, restored as a museum, event hall and five-room inn overlooking a working BNSF yard.
• Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum — 23 mi
  Crosbyton's museum of Blanco Canyon, built in 1958 as a copy of Hank Smith's Rock House, and the place to learn the canyon's 1871 fight between Mackenzie's cavalry and Quanah's Quahadi Comanche.
• American Windmill Museum — 30 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.

More markers nearby

• Twin Chimneys — 9.8 mi
• C. W. Post Rain Battles — 9.8 mi
• Charles W. Post — 11 mi
• Mrs. Merriweather Post — 11 mi