Pampa

The war and the years after it made Pampa a factory town. The air field filled it with servicemen's families, and the Columbian Carbon and Coltexo companies, the Celanese Corporation of America and the Skelly, Phillips, Shell and Kerr-McGee oil firms built plants nearby. Population climbed from 12,895 in 1941 to 24,664 in 1960, the year the city opened its own Coronado Inn. By 1967 thirty-four plants made petrochemicals, furniture, machinery and sheet metal, and the chamber of commerce billed Pampa as the Friendly City at the Top O' Texas, Where Wheat Grows and Oil Flows.

What the plaque says

Pampa In 1888 a telegraph station on the Southern Kansas Railroad developed here, and was named Glasgow. Renamed Sutton a year later, a post office was established in 1892 and the town was named Pampa by George Tyng (d. 1906), manager of the White Deer Land Company. Surveyor A. H. Doucette (1884-1964) laid out the town in 1902. The first school opened in 1903 and the first church was organized in 1906. J. N. Duncan (1858-1941) became Pampa's first mayor in 1912. Following a 1920s oil boom, the county seat was moved here from Lefors in 1928. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White Deer Land Museum — steps away
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 0.2 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• Roberts County Museum — 21 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 26 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• Gray County 50th Year Anniversary — steps away
• Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. — steps away
• Peter W. Gray — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Pampa — steps away