Midland County

In early 1884 an Ohio real estate firm bought land at the station, organized the Midland Town Company and promoted the settlement across the Midwest. The company drilled three water wells and held a successful land auction, and by early 1885 about 100 families lived there. The courthouse was finished by January 1886, and Baptist and Methodist churches and the first school followed that year. The Midland Gazette soon promoted the town as "the Queen City of the South Plains," and by 1890 it was among the most important cattle shipping centers in Texas, with about 600 people.

What the plaque says

Midland County Created organized March 4, 1885. March 25, 1885 Named for its location which is halfway between Ft. Worth and El Paso County seat, Midland First named Midway

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bush Family Home State Historic Site — 5.4 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.
• Museum of the Southwest — 5.5 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.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 5.7 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.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Marcy Trail — steps away
• Brown-Dorsey House — 4.3 mi
• John Valentine Pliska — 4.4 mi
• Staked Plains — 4.4 mi