Texas Panhandle Pioneers - John F. Weatherlys Family

The oil the plaque credits with Borger turned into a town within a season. In March 1926 the promoter A. P. (Ace) Borger and attorney John R. Miller bought a 240-acre townsite near the Canadian River, and within ninety days sensational advertising and the lure of oil drew more than 45,000 people. By October a Santa Fe spur, a post office and a school district were in place and Borger had incorporated, with Miller as mayor. Drinking water came by tank wagon until wells were drilled, and Thomas Hart Benton painted its Main Street as Boom Town.

What the plaque says

Texas Panhandle Pioneers - John F. Weatherlys Family Among first landowners in area. In 1898 started ranch 25 miles to the north. Ran country store, post office, phone exchange. Moved 1915 to Panhandle. The 1924 discovery of oil on their ranch led to the founding of Borger. They gave land to every church and school, and for a park, there. Weatherly (b. 1865, Tenn.) was a church, civic, Masonic leader; one of organizers of Hutchinson County. He died in 1944. His wife, Maggie Marie Deahl Weatherly (b. 1875, W.Va.), built Weatherly Hall at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth; educates missionaries and others; endows churches and Girl Scout work. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — steps away
  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.
• 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.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 23 mi
  Borger'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 — 24 mi
  A 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.

More markers nearby

• Oldest Bank in the Texas Panhandle — steps away
• Panhandle Herald — steps away
• Panhandle — steps away
• Callaghan Memorial Library — steps away