Parks Camp

Parks grew from two successful wells the Texas Company drilled here in 1917; later drilling found large quantities of gas. The county's Handbook entry credits Smith No. 1 near Parks, the first heavy gas well in Stephens County, with starting the local boom. Parks became a station on the Cisco and Northeastern Railway, and a post office opened in 1920 with William R. Dillon as postmaster. The town held about 700 people in the 1930s, 250 in 1940 and eighty by 1945. It was gone from county maps by 1980.

What the plaque says

Founded in 1918 and named for rancher J.W. Parks, on whose land it was located, Parks Camp was a company town built for employees of the Texas Company (Texaco). The discovery of oil on Parks' land caused an economic boom in the area, and the Parks Camp at its height was home to about 15,000 people. By the 1920s the camp's facilities included a school, bank, post office, stores, community hall, doctors, and rows of individual and barracks-type housing. The town began to decline in the early 1940s and was completely abandoned by the end of World War II. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 18 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 20 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Jail Art Center — 25 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 27 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.

More markers nearby

• Wayland School — 4.8 mi
• Walter Prescott Webb's Formative Years — 6.5 mi
• Stephens County Courthouse — 6.5 mi
• Camp Breckenridge, C.S.A. — 6.5 mi