Potter County

The man the county honors came to Texas to escape a scandal. Robert Potter, a North Carolina congressman, maimed his wife's cousin and another man in a jealous rage in 1831, served six months in prison, and in 1835 was expelled from the state House of Commons, officially for cheating at cards. He reached Nacogdoches that July. After independence he settled on Soda Lake, now Caddo Lake, and became a Moderator leader in the Regulator-Moderator War; Regulators surrounded his home and killed him on March 2, 1842. He was reburied in the State Cemetery in 1928.

What the plaque says

Potter County Formed from Young and Bexar Territories. Created August 21, 1876. Organized August 30, 1887. Named in Honor of Robert Potter 1800-1842. Signer of the Declaration of Independence. Secretary of the Navy. Senator in the Texas Congress, 1840. Amarillo, County Seat

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 1.9 mi
  Thirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.
• Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument — 4.5 mi
  Four sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.
• Cadillac Ranch — 8.7 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.
• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 16 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.

More markers nearby

• Potter County, Establishing of — steps away
• Henry B. Sanborn — steps away
• Amarillo — steps away
• Henry Bradley Sanborn — steps away