Randall County

Most of Randall County's people now live in a city the plaque never mentions. Amarillo, founded in Potter County, spread south into north central Randall County in the 1940s, raising the county's population to 13,774 by 1950. The count nearly tripled in the 1950s, to 33,913, and reached 53,885 in 1970. By 1980 three-quarters of the county's 75,062 residents lived in Amarillo. Even so, cattle and wheat still dominated the rural economy, and the county harvested almost two million bushels of wheat in 1982.

What the plaque says

Randall County Created 1876; named for Confederate general Horace Randal. Settled 1877 by rancher Leigh Dyer, brother-in-law of Chas. Goodnight, man who brought first cattle to Panhandle. Organized in 1889. County seat: Canyon. Home of West Texas State University, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Palo Duro State Park, Buffalo Lake. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 1.3 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.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 13 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 13 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.

More markers nearby

• Site of Conner Dugout — 1.0 mi
• Homesite of W. F. Heller, Pioneer Farmer — 1.1 mi
• Neblett Hospital and Clinic — 1.2 mi
• The Sad Monkey Railroad — 1.2 mi