Gray County 50th Year Anniversary

Gray County's government began with a petition. On April 14, 1902, the same day the Pampa townsite plat was approved, 152 voters petitioned to organize a county that had counted only 480 people two years before. When it was organized on May 27, Lefors became the seat, a two-story frame courthouse went up for less than $2,500, and Henry Thut, a Swiss immigrant, served as the first county treasurer. At the fiftieth-anniversary celebration in Pampa in October 1952, the guest of honor was Julia German Brooks, rescued as a child from a Cheyenne camp on McClellan Creek in 1874.

What the plaque says

Gray County 50th Year Anniversary Lest We Forget; Gray County; 50th Year Anniversary; 1902-1952; Dedicated to our early day pioneers, through whose efforts Gray County was established. And who contributed so much to our 50 years of progress. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White Deer Land Museum — steps away
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 0.3 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• Roberts County Museum — 21 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 26 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.

More markers nearby

• Peter W. Gray — steps away
• Pampa — steps away
• Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Pampa — steps away