Extinct Town of Anarene

Annie Graham's father, J. M. Keen, ranched here after Confederate service and built a herd of 15,000, branding with a terrapin he copied from a rock painting at Terrapin Springs near Olney. Her husband's family raised sheep, and their son Joy Graham liked to say he was born only because barbed wire made peace between the sheepman and the cattleman. Anarene's first business was hauling coal from the Newcastle mine. Early in World War I Sam Cowan shipped steers from its pens to St. Louis at a record eighteen cents a pound. The post office closed in 1955.

What the plaque says

Landowner Charles E. Graham (1872-1937) in 1908 granted the Wichita Falls and Southern Railroad a route across his property and platted a town at this site. Anarene was named for his wife Annie Lawrence Graham, daughter of pioneer cattleman J. Marion Keen. Graham built a hotel and obtained a post office, cattle pens, dipping vat and other facilities. The town schoolhouse was used for religious services. In 1921 oil was discovered nearby. A refinery was built in 1938. When oil production ceased and the trains stopped running in 1954, Anarene quickly declined. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Royal Theater — 8.0 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.
• Fort Belknap — 23 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 25 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

• Archer County — 2.1 mi
• Archer City Methodist Church — 7.9 mi
• First Baptist Church of Archer City — 7.9 mi
• Archer County Discovery Well — 8.0 mi