Monahans Sandhills State Park and Museum

The park takes its name from a well. Thomas John (Pat) Monahan dug the first water well between the Pecos River and Big Spring here in 1881 and picked the spot for a railroad water tank, and the place was first called Monahan's Well. The Texas and Pacific reached it in August 1881, a post office followed in 1883, and in 1900 James R. Holman opened the Monahans Hotel for prospectors and land agents. Growth was slow: the school begun in 1898 had thirty-six students the next year, and Monahans counted about eighty-nine people in 1905.

What the plaque says

Monahans Sandhills State Park and Museum In these shifting seas of sand, rich in stone evidences of primitive men, today's visitors find flint points, sandstone metates and manos of peoples who were here as early as 10,000 years ago and late as the 1870s. Bones of great mammoths and gigantic bison prove that this desert was in post-glacial times a land of lakes and tall grasses. Cabeza de Vaca in 1535 and Antonio de Espejo in 1583 encountered Jumanos, historic tribe which hunted here. In 1590 Castano de Sosa found a tribe he called Vaqueros because they lived by hunting cows (buffalo)--the tribe later called Apaches. For more than 100 years at this stop on great Comanche War Trail extending into Mexico. Apache fought Comanche for pools of water and acorns of dwarf Shinnery oak. The California or Emigrant Trail through the Sand Hills started with the gold rush. Was first mapped in September 1849 by Capt. Randolph B. Marcy, U. S. topographical engineers, and in 1854 by Capt. John Pope, who explored a railroad route toward the Pacific Ocean. 3,000 acres of Sand Hills were designated in 1957 as a state park, after acquisition and construction of museum by Ward County. Has picnic facilities. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Monahans Sandhills State Park — steps away
  A small corner of a 200-mile dune field east of the Pecos, where fresh water lies just under the sand and a forest of shin oak grows no higher than your knee.
• Million Barrel Museum — 4.2 mi
  An oil reservoir that could not hold oil, then a water park that lasted one day, now a museum in Monahans with the story of the Pyote bomber base beside it.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 22 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Roy Orbison Museum — 22 mi
  A volunteer-run room in the oil town where Roy Orbison spent his high school years, opened on request, with a guitar he played and his tinted prescription sunglasses.

More markers nearby

• Million Barrel Tank — 4.2 mi
• Willow Springs — 13 mi
• Ward County — 16 mi
• Rattlesnake Bomber Base — 20 mi