Moore County

Edwin Ward Moore resigned from the United States Navy in 1839 to command the Texas Navy. He sailed off the Mexican coast, made a working alliance with the Yucatán rebels, captured Tabasco and charted the Texas coast, a survey later published by the British Admiralty. In 1843 President Sam Houston suspended him for disobedience; Moore demanded a trial, and a court-martial cleared him of all but four minor charges. Congress awarded him five years' pay in 1857, and in 1860 he built the Galveston Customhouse. He died in New York City in 1865.

What the plaque says

Created 1876 from Bexar Land District. Named in honor of Edwin W. Moore (1810-1865), commodore of the navy, Republic of Texas. County was organized July 5, 1892, with Dumas (named for promoter of the townsite) as county seat. Stagecoach and freighters furnished transportation in early days. The county was thinly settled; ranching was the main industry, prior to discoveries of oil and gas in 1926. A zinc smelter was built in 1936. Economy is now based on petrochemicals, helium, oil, gas, cattle feeding, beef packing, ranching, grains, soybeans and corn. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Window on the Plains Museum — 5.8 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 — 19 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 — 22 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 — 23 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

• Route of the Old Tascosa-Dodge City Trail — steps away
• Site of Historic Drift Fence — 5.6 mi
• Geological Riches of Moore County — 5.6 mi
• City of Dumas — 6.8 mi