Early Wilbarger County

Mrs. A. T. Boger held classes in a dugout east of Vernon in 1879, and by the next year a school had been built, with L. N. Perkins teaching. When the county organized in 1881 it had just fifty-six voters. It grew quickly despite drought, prairie dogs and stampeding trail herds. The Handbook of Texas says Comanche and Kiowa people from Oklahoma marketed in Vernon with their government allotments. D. O. McConnell founded the Vernon Weekly Call in 1889, and by 1890 the county had 7,092 people.

What the plaque says

Organized 1858 and named in honor of Matthias and Josiah P. Wilbarger, early Texas settlers. Josiah, a surveyor, had become famous as the man who lived 12 years after being scalped by Comanches, 1833, near Austin. He had saved his life by putting a wool sock on his head; he was rescued next day by neighbors. An adobe house built 1878 by Jonathan and C. F. Doan, the first Wilbarger County settlers, marks the Red River crossing of the famous Western Cattle Trail. Vernon (formerly Eagle Flat) became county seat in 1881. The first railroad reached town, 1886. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Red River Valley Museum — 2.1 mi
  Vernon's museum on College Drive, with rooms on the Waggoner ranch empire, Doan's Crossing and early Vernon, and the largest known collection of Electra Waggoner Biggs's art.
• Doan's Crossing — 13 mi
  A store, an adobe house and a granite marker of ranch brands at the Red River ford where the Western Trail herds left Texas, kept alive by a May picnic held since 1884.
• Fire Hall Museum — 28 mi
  Crowell's local museum in the 1922 firehouse on Main Street, in a county-seat town that was almost wiped away by the tornado of April 1942 and rebuilt.
• Quanah, Acme and Pacific Depot Museum — 28 mi
  The Spanish Colonial Revival depot of a little railroad that set out for El Paso and never got past Floydada, now Hardeman County's museum alongside the county's 1890 jail.

More markers nearby

• Thaddeus Edgar Johnson — steps away
• Wilbarger County — 2.1 mi
• Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Substation No. 12, Home of Hybrid Sorghums — 14 mi
• Medicine Mound Community — 18 mi