Gray County

Gray County held only 480 people in 1900, and ranching and then farming ran it until oil. The H. F. Wilcox Oil and Gas Company's Worley-McReynolds well, drilled five miles south of Pampa in 1926, led to the Lefors, Bowers and south Pampa fields, and production mushroomed in 1929. The population leaped from 4,663 in 1920 to 22,090 in 1930. A petrochemical industry making carbon black and synthetic materials grew out of the oil and carried the county to a peak of 31,535 people in 1960. By the end of 2004 it had produced more than 672 million barrels.

What the plaque says

Gray County Formed from Young and Bexar Territories. Created August 21, 1876. Organized May 27, 1902. Named in Honor of Peter W. Gray 1819-1874. Member of the first Legislature of Texas. Member of the Confederate Congress. Appointed to the Texas Supreme bench in 1874. County Seat, Lefors, 1902. Pampa, since 1928.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 1.9 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.
• White Deer Land Museum — 2.0 mi
  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.
• Roberts County Museum — 20 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.
• Phillips 66 Station, McLean — 28 mi
  A 1929 cottage-style Phillips 66 station on First Street in McLean, the town I-40 went around last and whose Route 66 business district stayed much as it was.

More markers nearby

• Woody Guthrie — 1.9 mi
• First Methodist Church of Pampa — 2.0 mi
• Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. — 2.0 mi
• Pampa — 2.1 mi