Odessa Land & Townsite Company

The excursion trains were the company's main sales tool. They ran to Odessa twice a month from 1886 to 1888. After the first trip, the round-trip fare from any northern city was cut to thirty-five dollars, with stopovers allowed at any point in Texas, but travelers had to bring their own blankets and food from home. The trains did bring settlers. Still, the Ector County entry calls the company's promises exaggerated and says too few buyers came, and after a two-year drought the company went bankrupt and stopped operating in 1889.

What the plaque says

Odessa Land & Townsite Company The Texas & Pacific Railroad transferred 640 acres of its land grants here in 1886 to John Hoge of Zanesville, Ohio. He formed the Odessa land & townsite company to promote sale of town lots. Prime house lots sold for $150 and business lots for $200. Literature was distributed in eastern states citing rich soil, pure water, healthful climate, and railroad sponsored excursion trains with free sleeping cars for prospective Byers form 1886 to 1889. A small frame building on this site, razed in 1911, served as the land office, and later as a school and church. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.4 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.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 9.0 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.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Odessa Telephone Exchange — steps away
• Site of The Odessa Sanitarium — steps away
• Site of The Dawson Saloon — steps away
• Ector County Courthouse — steps away