Midland County

The trails that met here had names. In 1839 Mexican travelers blazed the Chihuahua Trail northwest from the site of Big Spring to Castle Gap and Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos. The Emigrant Road led the other way, toward the site of Preston on the Red River. Wagon roads ran from the head of the North Concho to the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos and to Five Wells and Laguna Cuates, and two more ran from Five Wells to Monument Spring in New Mexico, roads that the parties surveying the Texas boundary came to know after 1850.

What the plaque says

Midland County (Created and organized, March 1885) First known as the junction of many trails and site of the last Comanche raid into Texas. In 1881 the Texas and Pacific Railroad was built; equi-distant between El Paso and Fort Worth, this became known as Midland. First settler was a sheepman in 1882. Cattlemen came with Herefords in 1888. Water wells and windmills lured small farmers. Became headquarters for 1928 Permian Basin oil discovery. In 1945 its first well came in. The "Midland Man", oldest skeletal remains in North America (18,500 B. C.), was found in 1954. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 1.1 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 8.5 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.
• Museum of the Southwest — 8.8 mi
  Midland's art and science museum in the 1937 house of oilman Fred Turner and his wife Juliette, with added galleries, a children's museum and a planetarium on the grounds.
• Bush Family Home State Historic Site — 9.1 mi
  The small 1939 frame house on West Ohio Avenue where George and Barbara Bush raised their young family in Midland's 1950s oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site.

More markers nearby

• Site of Old Midland Army Flying School — 1.0 mi
• Homer Robert Henderson — 5.4 mi
• Comanche War Trail — 5.6 mi
• Ector County — 5.6 mi