Masterson

The town took the name of rancher Robert Benjamin Masterson, on whose land it began, and mounted riders once inspected its Denver gas line for leaks. The Handbook of Texas says the Exell Helium Plant began production on March 13, 1943, to supply lifting gas for airships and barrage balloons, and that some of its helium figured in the development of the first atomic bomb. The plant twice won the Army-Navy E Award, and for years a 125-foot guard tower built from an old oil derrick, with a man-powered elevator, stood on its grounds.

What the plaque says

In 1927, three companies combined to construct a natural gas plant and pipeline to produce gas for Denver, Colorado. Small houses and a hotel were constructed for married and single workers. A one-room school was soon constructed for the workers' children on land donated by Miles Bivins, and the small community came to be known as Bivins. In later years the camp and the school expanded. To meet the demand for helium during World War II, a plant to be operated by the Bureau of Mines was constructed near Bivins; it began production in 1943, after U.S. entry into the war. In order to provide services to the workers at the new Exell Helium Plant, seventy-five homes, garages, a recreation hall and a playground were also constructed at the site. During the late 1940s a post office was established in the community and when the postal service rejected the name "Bivins," the name "Masterson" was submitted after a prominent area rancher. A Baptist church was organized and attended by members of all denominations, and community activities such as 4-H, Boy and Girl Scouts and home demonstration clubs flourished. In 1963, residents of the original Bivins site were notified that their homes were to be sold and they must move, and residents at the Exell site also began to move away, leaving both camps practically abandoned by 1970. The local school closed in 1978 and the post office closed in 1984. While the Exell Helium Plant closed in the late 1990s, the Bivins plant continues to gather and produce natural gas. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Window on the Plains Museum — 15 mi
  Moore County's free museum on the Dumas highway, telling an industrial Panhandle of zinc smelters, helium and gas plants alongside the farm and ranch rooms.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 15 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 18 mi
  The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 21 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

• First Gas Well in the Panhandle of Texas — 4.2 mi
• Route of the Old Tascosa-Dodge City Trail — 8.8 mi
• Moore County — 8.8 mi
• First Cemetery in Potter County — 12 mi