Mobeetie Post Office

The new town by the tracks soon proved itself as a shipping point for the surrounding ranches and farms. In the 1930s it built modern school buildings with a gymnasium-auditorium, while the school in the old town kept running, and local women organized a civic club later known as the Blue Bonnet Club. Old Mobeetie was taken into the incorporated new town, which counted about 500 people in 1940. Better highways and nearby Pampa drew people away, to 291 by 1980, and in 1984 Mobeetie had nine businesses, a bank, three churches and a twelve-grade school.

What the plaque says

Mobeetie Post Office Early mail service in Wheeler County was established at Fort Elliott. In 1879, a U.S. post office opened in the town of Mobeetie, previously known as Sweetwater. George A. Montgomery served as the first postmaster. In 1928, after the town moved one-mile north to this present site on the Santa Fe railroad line, a new post office was built. Rural mail routes were expanded in the 1930s to serve the increasing numbers of farm families, but decreased in later years after drought and harsh conditions led to the abandonment of some farms. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Mobeetie Jail Museum — 1.3 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.
• Roberts County Museum — 15 mi
  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.
• Devil's Rope and Old Route 66 Museum — 23 mi
  Barbed wire and the Texas road in McLean's old brassiere factory: the fence that closed the open range, from the salesmen who sold it to the Panhandle ranches it divided.
• Phillips 66 Station, McLean — 23 mi
  A 1929 cottage-style Phillips 66 station on First Street in McLean, the town I-40 went around last and whose Route 66 business district stayed much as it was.

More markers nearby

• Mobeetie First Baptist Church — steps away
• Mobeetie United Methodist Church — steps away
• Mobeetie — 1.3 mi
• Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Elliott — 1.6 mi