Lubbock County

The county is 893 square miles of flat tableland sloping gently from northwest to southeast, 2,900 to 3,400 feet up. Two or three feet under its loams lies a hardpan of caliche that has mostly kept streams from cutting through, and beneath that about 300 feet of water-filled sand, part of the Ogallala Aquifer. In 1968 there were 922 playas. Buffalo and blue grama grass covered the land, which was treeless except for cottonwoods and hackberries in the canyons. Rain averages 18.41 inches a year, most of it in a 208-day growing season.

What the plaque says

Lubbock County Formed from Young and Bexar territories Created August 21, 1876 Organized March 10, 1891 Named in honor of Colonel Thomas S. Lubbock 1817 - 1862 Member of the New Orleans Greys at the storming of Bexar, commander of a company in the Santa Fe Expedition, member of the Somervell Expedition, co-organizer of the famous Terry's Texas Rangers, 1861. County seat, Lubbock

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buddy Holly Center — 0.5 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 1.3 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 2.3 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 3.6 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• Colonel T. S. Lubbock and Texas in the Civil War — steps away
• Mackenzie Scout Trail — steps away
• Congressman George Mahon — 0.3 mi
• First Methodist Church of Lubbock — 0.3 mi