First National Bank of Burkburnett

The town this bank served was a railroad promotion. In 1906 Burk Burnett sold 16,997 acres of ranch land to investors led by Joseph A. Kemp and Frank Kell, who meant to push the Wichita Falls and Northwestern into the wheat country of Oklahoma and Kansas and keep the Wichita Falls flour mills busy. Their Red River Land Company auctioned lots on June 6, 1907. A depot opened that year, and by 1915 the Katy ran nineteen trains a day to the town. Burkburnett incorporated in 1913 with about 1,000 people and built a water system in 1918.

What the plaque says

City's oldest business institution, organized May 15, 1907. Joseph A. Kemp, one of townsite owners, was president; John G. Hardin, merchant (and later oil magnate and executive of this bank), vice president; H. D. Creath, cashier. S. B. Burnett, for whom town was named, was one of the original depositors. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 13 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Kell House Museum — 14 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 26 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.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 29 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• Fowler Discovery Well — 0.5 mi
• John Gerham Hardin — 0.7 mi
• Samuel Burk Burnett — 0.7 mi
• Simon Peter Hawkins — 1.1 mi