First Tree Texas High Plains

The man who planted the tree had seen the golden spike driven. Thomas Boger Cree, a Union Army teamster at fourteen, went to work for the Union Pacific and was corral boss for the company building the first transcontinental line; he was at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. He then helped build the Katy line toward Fort Worth and married Melissa Ballard, a niece of Jesse Chisholm. He came here working for the Fort Worth and Denver City. In 1892 the Crees left for ranchland near Cheyenne, Oklahoma, and later settled in Wheeler County.

What the plaque says

First Tree Texas High Plains Set front dugout home by Thomas Cree, 1888. Good luck symbol of settlers through drouth, blizzard and heat. Cree's bois d'arc tree died in the 1970s. County residents planted a new tree here in 1990 as a memorial to the area's early pioneers. The 33rd Anniversary National Convention, Men's Garden Clubs of America, meeting at Amarillo, June 14-17, 1965, formally recognized and paid tribute to the significance of Thomas Cree's little tree and to the memory of this heroic early gardener of these High Plains. (1967) Thomas Cree Homesite After serving as a teamster in the Civil War (1861-65), Thadium (Thomas) B. Cree worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. In 1888 he and his wife came to the High Plains. They acquired this land and, with no trees for lumber, they built a dugout home. Cree traveled 35 miles at his wife's request to find a sapling and planted it here. He watered it from a nearby lake that he dug from a buffalo wallow. The tree never grew but lived many years despite blizzard, heat, and drought. Gov. John Connally dedicated an historical marker in 1963 to the first tree in the Panhandle. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — 5.2 mi
  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 — 15 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.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 23 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Oldest Bank in the Texas Panhandle — 5.1 mi
• Texas Panhandle Pioneers - John F. Weatherlys Family — 5.1 mi
• Callaghan Memorial Library — 5.1 mi
• Carson County — 5.1 mi