Notrees

The name was nearly true. Notrees had one native tree, and it was cut down to make room for a large Shell gas plant. Grocer Charlie Brown opened his store in 1946, became the first postmaster that year and supplied the name. The town served the TXL oilfield, and by 1956 it had ten oil company camps and more than 500 people, with a school, a recreation hall, a liquor store and two groceries. The camps later closed, but by the 1980s mesquite and other trees had grown up around the town, which counted 338 people.

What the plaque says

Notrees Post Office established 1944 in drug store of C. J. Brown, Jr., who named it in response to U.S. Postoffice Dept. request for title suitable to locality. Residents have since made history by planting shade trees. Now production hub of permian basin; center of gas processing industry, and home of Otto's boys ranch. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Odessa Meteor Crater — 20 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.
• Monahans Sandhills State Park — 21 mi
  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 — 23 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.
• White-Pool House — 24 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.

More markers nearby

• Goldsmith — 9.3 mi
• Captain Randolph B. Marcy's Southern Route Expedition — 11 mi
• Penwell — 15 mi
• The Caprock — 16 mi