Finch-Lord-Nelson and the Founding of Panhandle City

The replica barn belongs to a museum that grew from one small house. The Carson County Square House Museum opened in 1967 around a twenty-four-foot square frame house, one of the oldest in the county, and by 1986 had eight structures: a pioneer dugout, a Santa Fe caboose, a bank exhibit and blacksmith shop, Freedom Hall, Moody Hall's wildlife and the Finch, Lord, and Nelson farm and ranch exhibits, with an Eclipse windmill on the grounds. It holds more than 10,000 artifacts and is accredited by the American Association of Museums. County funds pay utilities and staff.

What the plaque says

Finch-Lord-Nelson and the Founding of Panhandle City Cattle firm that had brought first Herefords to region-- Lue Finch, W. H. Lord, O. H. Nelson-- in 1887 promoted Panhandle City, as railroad line approached. They sent in ten cowboys to stake claims around city, which prospered as county seat. The Finch-Lord-Nelson firm (which included John A. Finch after 1887) left descendants to continue pioneering. Of their 1887 employees, J. E. Southwood and W. D. Jolly also remained. This little red barn is a replica symbolic of frontier structures built by Finch-Lord-Nelson for the 1887 claimsmen. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — steps away
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Gem Theatre — 16 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 23 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 24 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.

More markers nearby

• Last Great Panhandle Cattle Drive to Montana — steps away
• Old County Bookmobile, First "Inside Service" Bookmobile in Texas — steps away
• Texas Panhandle Pioneers - The Simms Brothers — steps away
• Temple Lea Houston — steps away