Miami Railroad Depot

The Handbook of Texas calls Miami the last real cowtown in the Panhandle, a shipping point for the Laurel Leaf, Turkey Track and Bar CC outfits. Its newspaper began as the Miami Weekly Echo in 1894 and became the Miami Chief in 1911. Since 1949 the town has held a National Cow Calling Contest, begun as part of its Old Settlers' Reunion, and it advertises itself as the Sweetheart of the Plains, after the supposed meaning of its name. The restored depot now houses the Roberts County Museum, in one of the most sparsely populated counties in Texas.

What the plaque says

When the Southern Kansas Railway Company of Texas built a line through Roberts County in 1887, Miami developed at the end of the track as a campsite for workers. The crew set up a kitchen and a tent hotel. Soon the railroad built a public water well and telegraph lines to nearby Fort Elliott. Passengers and supplies for the post and nearby town of Mobeetie began arriving by rail. This depot was erected in 1888 between North Main and Birge Street. The Santa Fe Railroad bought the line in 1899 and this structure remained in service until 1978. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Roberts County Museum — steps away
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Old Mobeetie Jail Museum — 17 mi
  The 1886 stone jail of the Panhandle's first county seat, the buffalo hunters' Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek that ran the courts for fifteen counties before losing its fort, railroad hopes and county seat.
• The Citadelle Art Museum — 21 mi
  A 1910 Baptist church saved from demolition in 1977, made into a family home filled with art, and given to Canadian in 2009 as one of the Panhandle's few art museums.
• River Valley Pioneer Museum — 21 mi
  The Hemphill County museum in Canadian, a Santa Fe division town of 1887 on the river breaks that held one of the first commercial rodeos in Texas and voted itself dry in 1903.

More markers nearby

• Cottage Hotel — steps away
• County Named for Prominent Confederate Colonel O. M. Roberts — steps away
• Roberts County — 4.5 mi
• Fossil Beds — 5.6 mi