Hicks & Cobb General Merchandise Store

The store's walls are not what they seem: the round granite stones are, in one owner's words, "actually prehistoric gravel." Beside the store stands the W. W. Cole Building, also dated 1933, which began as the bank, drugstore and post office and later served as a gas station. A ruined schoolhouse, closed in the 1940s, stands off FM 1167. One account counts six buildings left in the town by the end of the Depression, and later three.

What the plaque says

Hicks & Cobb General Merchandise Store The townsite of Medicine Mound had long been a thriving village when brothers-in-law Lon L. Cobb and Ira Lee Hicks arrived in the area with their families in 1927 and opened a general merchandise store. The store sold such items as work clothes and clothing material, shoes, cotton sacks, groceries and horse feed. Regular customers warmed themselves by the fire in winter, indulging in conversation and checkers. In 1933 a fire all but destroyed the townsite, but Hicks and Cobb rebuilt that year with round granite cobblestones from Oklahoma. Lon L. Cobb died in 1942. Hicks carried on and the store was among the last businesses to serve area residents and migrant agricultural workers. Ira Lee Hicks died in 1966; the structure became a community gathering place and a Medicine Mound museum. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Copper Breaks State Park — 10 mi
  Red badlands on the Pease River between Quanah and Crowell, streaked with the green copper that lured a Civil War general here to mine, with longhorns and a dark-sky designation.
• Quanah, Acme and Pacific Depot Museum — 11 mi
  The Spanish Colonial Revival depot of a little railroad that set out for El Paso and never got past Floydada, now Hardeman County's museum alongside the county's 1890 jail.
• Red River Valley Museum — 16 mi
  Vernon's museum on College Drive, with rooms on the Waggoner ranch empire, Doan's Crossing and early Vernon, and the largest known collection of Electra Waggoner Biggs's art.
• Fire Hall Museum — 16 mi
  Crowell's local museum in the 1922 firehouse on Main Street, in a county-seat town that was almost wiped away by the tornado of April 1942 and rebuilt.

More markers nearby

• Medicine Mound Community — steps away
• W. P. A. Sanitation Project — steps away
• Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Substation No. 12, Home of Hybrid Sorghums — 4.5 mi
• Site of the Town of Margaret — 8.5 mi