Groom

The colonel behind the town's name was an English-born cattle breeder, about seventy when he took on the Panhandle. B. B. Groom had spent forty years importing shorthorns and polled Angus into the United States, with an estate called Vinewood near Winchester, Kentucky, until the panic of 1873 forced him to auction most of his herd. Kinship to Charles G. Francklyn put him in charge of the syndicate's Panhandle range in 1882, where he was the first to hire well drillers to water cattle. His spending helped bankrupt the company by 1886. He died in England in March 1906.

What the plaque says

Groom Founded 1902 by W. S. Wilkerson, local landowner, when Rock Island Railroad built west; named for Col. B. B. Groom, 1880s agent of Franklyn Land & Cattle Co. Col. Groom was first to try power farming on Plains. Town is today hub of rich farming and ranching area. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The two-story house the Goodnights moved into on December 27, 1887, after leaving the JA, with a porch that looks over bison descended from the calves Mary Ann saved.
• Gem Theatre — 16 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.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 18 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.
• Donley County Courthouse — 22 mi
  Bulger and Rapp's red brick and white stone courthouse of 1891, the oldest in use in the Panhandle, given back its third floor and towers in a 2003 restoration.

More markers nearby

• Dr. Charles L. Fields — steps away
• State National Bank — steps away
• Site of Old Goodnight College — 12 mi
• Town of Goodnight — 12 mi