Potter County, Establishing of

The 1887 election was also a contest among townsites. William B. Plemons, the first county judge, had a site near the head of Amarillo Creek; Frank Lester, backed by Henry Sanborn, promoted Plains City; and Jesse Jenkins, a Tascosa saloon owner, renamed the railroad camp of Ragtown as Odessa. J. T. Berry's Oneida won after he promised each LX cowhand a business lot and a residence lot. Before the railroad the county had been nearly empty: the 1880 census found twenty-eight people, two of them Black, on three ranches, with 14,000 cattle and 4,200 sheep.

What the plaque says

Potter County, Establishing of Named for Robert Potter, Secretary of the Navy (1836) and Senator (1840-42) of the Republic of Texas. In territory ranged by Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa Indians, and since 1600 familiar to Spanish military parties and French traders. On established routes of the Great Spanish Road from Santa Fe to San Antonio (1786) and the Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail of 1840 which was followed in 1849 by California gold seekers. Although still uninhabited, the county was created in 1876 by Texas Legislature. The years 1874-78 saw Indians expelled and buffalo replaced by longhorns. In 1877 the famous LX Ranch was established, with headquarters 20 miles north of this site. The Frying Pan, first large ranch fenced with barbed wire, in 1881 built its headquarters 16 miles to the west. Railroad construction across the Texas Panhandle made local government desirable. LX and Frying Pan cowboys were the electors who voted on Aug. 30, 1887, to organize Potter County. This county was discovery site (1918) of the vast Panhandle-Hugoton Gas Field. It is noted as location of Alibates National Monument (established 1965), an aboriginal flint quarry, with ruins of prehistoric Indian villages inhabited as early as 10,000 B.C. (1970).

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 1.8 mi
  Thirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.
• Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument — 4.5 mi
  Four sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.
• Cadillac Ranch — 8.7 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.
• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 16 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.

More markers nearby

• Potter County — steps away
• Henry B. Sanborn — 0.2 mi
• Amarillo — 0.2 mi
• Henry Bradley Sanborn — 0.2 mi