Hamblen Drive

The road Hamblen fought for served Wayside, the farm community south of the canyon. It began as a rural school district in 1893 and was first called Beulah, for a daughter of the McSpadden family, who gave the school land. When Mrs. Hervey J. Bradford opened a post office in September 1897, she renamed it Wayside for its place on the "way-side" of the canyon. The first settlers on that side were JA Ranch cowhands working line camps along the south rim. In 1940 Wayside had a consolidated high school, two stores and forty people.

What the plaque says

Hamblen Drive Named for William H. Hamblen (1878-1952), who in the 1890s pioneered a crude road (about 6 mi. N) into Palo Duro Canyon along old Indian trails. This cut 120 miles off settlers' trips to the courthouse in Claude, but was steep and dangerous. Hamblen and his wife, Ada (1883-1955), ranched near Wayside after 1905. He worked unceasingly to get a passable road through Palo Duro. Elected county commissioner in 1928, he at last had a graded road built. By decision of the commissioners court, the road was dedicated in 1930 as Hamblen Drive. With its paving in 1954, a dream of a lifetime was realized. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lighthouse Trail — 17 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 18 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 19 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
• Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site — 22 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.

More markers nearby

• The S.P. Hamblen Family — 4.7 mi
• Dugout of W. M. Dye — 10 mi
• Vigo Park Methodist Church — 11 mi
• The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon — 15 mi