Geological Riches of Moore County

Moore County's modern industries grew from the Panhandle oil and gas field. Large-scale production began in 1927, when the Apache Refining Company built the county's first industrial plant at what became Sunray, a town whose early buildings were made largely of scrap from oil rigs. Skelly, Phillips and Shamrock built refineries between 1927 and 1932. Carbon black plants burned the field's sour gas, a zinc smelter opened near Dumas in 1936, and a wartime nitrogen plant near Etter brought the town of Cactus. The Handbook of Texas credits the county with two-thirds of the nation's helium.

What the plaque says

Have proved beneficial from earliest times when prehistoric man developed first industry in Texas by mining flint deposits along the Canadian River. Items made from these quarries have been found over a large portion of the western United States. Slabs of dolomite from area were used to build sturdy, warm homes; interiors were coated with mixture of sand, clay and caliche -- an advance uncommon in prehistoric North America. Modern man has established 31 industries based on oil and gas, to take advantage of geological riches untapped by ancient man. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Window on the Plains Museum — steps away
  Moore County's free museum on the Dumas highway, telling an industrial Panhandle of zinc smelters, helium and gas plants alongside the farm and ranch rooms.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 24 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.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 26 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.
• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 27 mi
  The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.

More markers nearby

• Site of Historic Drift Fence — steps away
• City of Dumas — 1.1 mi
• Moore County Courthouse — 1.1 mi
• Moore County — 5.6 mi