Moore County Courthouse

The square nearly outlived its town. A grasshopper plague in the summer of 1893 and the hard winter that followed almost emptied Dumas; Louis Dumas himself gave up and went back to Grayson County, and at times only one family lived on the townsite. In 1900 Arthur Nield's store was the only business in operation. Phillips and Son bought it in 1904, the first bank opened in 1908 and the Moore County Pioneer began in 1909, but supplies were still hauled overland from Amarillo until the railroad arrived in 1931.

What the plaque says

Land for this courthouse square was donated by Louis Dumas, who laid out the townsite in 1891. One year later, Moore County was formally organized as a government, and in 1893 the county's first courthouse was built. The original courthouse was replaced by the current structure, built by C. S. Lambie and Company at a cost of $155,000. The brick building was occupied by county officials during the first week of August 1931. Both courthouses have held all county records and have served as focal points for the community and for the entire county. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Window on the Plains Museum — 1.0 mi
  Moore County's free museum on the Dumas highway, telling an industrial Panhandle of zinc smelters, helium and gas plants alongside the farm and ranch rooms.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 24 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 26 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Old Tascosa and the Julian Bivins Museum — 28 mi
  The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.

More markers nearby

• City of Dumas — steps away
• Geological Riches of Moore County — 1.1 mi
• Site of Historic Drift Fence — 1.1 mi
• Moore County — 6.8 mi