Panhandle

The ordnance plant the plaque mentions had a second life. Built in 1942 on 16,000 acres to make bombs and shells, it closed when the war ended in August 1945, and in 1949 the government sold it to Texas Technological College for one dollar, keeping the right to take it back. The Atomic Energy Commission reclaimed 10,000 acres in 1951. Pantex became the sole plant for nuclear weapons disassembly and modification in 1965, assembled its last weapon in 1991, and after the Cold War took apart thousands of warheads a year.

What the plaque says

Panhandle In 1880s, capital of Panhandle area. Settled when slaughter of buffalo sent Indians to live on reservations. Terminus of Santa Fe Railway, 1887. Here immigrant trains brought colonists, who plowed old Indian range into wheat fields and civilization. Settlers banked here, saw the dentist, got supplies, lumber, mail, windmills, fencing. Was made county seat when Carson County was organized in 1888. Nearby is site of first oil well in area, drilled 1921. Also nearby, Pantex Farms of Texas Technological University, on site of World War II Ordnance Plant. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — 0.2 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Gem Theatre — 16 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 23 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.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Texan Hotel — steps away
• Texas Panhandle Pioneers - John F. Weatherlys Family — steps away
• Oldest Bank in the Texas Panhandle — steps away
• Panhandle Herald — steps away