Geraldine

Geraldine was a promotion of Philander H. Fitzgerald, who owned the Indianapolis newspaper American Tribune and advertised the town in it. His company, chartered on March 14, 1901, planned a city of 20,000. The town was big enough for a newspaper and a post office, which stayed open until 1908, and oil income kept its school going until 1941. Oil also brought the county's largest well, the Wilmut, to the old townsite. In the 1930s the paleontologist Alfred Romer found the Geraldine Bone Bed, one of the largest fossil pits in Texas, nine miles south of Holliday.

What the plaque says

In 1901, after failing to locate suitable land in Oklahoma, the American Tribune New Colony Company of Indianapolis acquired over 59,000 acres in this area for an immigration project. A post office was established in March 1902, and by grand opening, May 20, 1902, Geraldine had been surveyed, 2 water wells drilled, 75 buildings erected, and 125 farm families settled. A severe drought and lack of ground water caused all but 20 families to leave by Jan. 1903. In 1905 County Court sold the tract to former owner Luke F. Wilson, and Geraldine was vacated. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Royal Theater — 9.5 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.
• Kell House Museum — 18 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 — 19 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.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Dad's Corner — 2.7 mi
• The D. S. Dudley Show — 6.9 mi
• First Methodist Church of Holliday — 7.0 mi
• Maggie and Herod "Pap" Simpson — 7.1 mi