Old Town of Camp Springs

The Handbook of Texas says the grass and springs at Camp Springs made it a favored camping spot, first for Indians and later for travelers, and it calls W. H. Camp a sheepherder who settled on Spring Creek. When the post office opened in 1891, residents named the town Afra for the postmistress's son, and later renamed it. Between 1920 and 1940 it reached fifty people and had a bank, a school, stores and churches. The post office closed by the early 1950s, and ten people lived there in 1990 and 2000.

What the plaque says

Named for W. H. Camp, an early settler who built a dugout in 1878 at springs, one-half mile northwest of here. Petrified trees--one 300 feet tall--and bones of prehistoric animals have been found in area. Tools, pictographs in nearby cave indicate Indians camped here. Emigrant trail to California, blazed in 1849 by Army Captain R. B. Marcy, came through region. General Robert E. Lee followed part of same trail searching for hostile Comanches in 1856. Both men made camp at Green Springs, six miles southwest. Post office was established, 1891. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — 14 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 25 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.
• Pioneer Museum — 26 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.

More markers nearby

• Hobbs Cemetery — 6.1 mi
• Pyron, Texas — 10 mi
• Scurry County — 13 mi
• County Named for Texas Confederate William R. Scurry 1821-1864 — 13 mi