Historical Marker
John A. Holmes
Panhandle, Carson County · Texas
Erected 1967
Holmes died in a town the state had already tried to tame. In spring 1927 Governor Dan Moody sent Texas Rangers under captains Francis A. Hamer and Thomas R. Hickman to Borger, where a crime ring around "Two-Gun Dick" Herwig, an associate of Mayor John R. Miller, ran the brothels, gambling dens and speakeasies of Dixon Street. The violence went on. After Holmes was killed by an unknown assassin on September 18, 1929, Moody imposed martial law for a month and sent state troops. Ace Borger, the town's founder, was himself shot dead in 1934.
What the plaque says
John A. Holmes (1886-1929) Born in Mississippi; received law degree from University of Texas. Became county attorney of Roberts County. Elected district attorney of 31st Judicial District in 1922. In 1928, appointed district attorney of 84th District by Governor of Texas to relentlessly prosecute criminals who infested oil fields during Borger's boom years. Often threatened by gangsters, he was shot to death by gunmen at his home in Borger. (1967)
Where it stands
35.35330, -101.37080 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Carson County Square House Museum — 0.7 miThe 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.
- Gem Theatre — 17 miClaude'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.
- Hutchinson County Museum — 22 miBorger'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.
- Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 23 miA Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.