Randall County

Buffalo Lake, named on this plaque, lies three miles south of Umbarger behind Umbarger Dam on upper Tierra Blanca Creek. The Farm Security Administration began the dam in February 1938 and finished it on June 15 of that year, building it to store water for recreation. The Soil Conservation Service ran the project until 1953, when the Forest Service took over, and in 1958 the Fish and Wildlife Service made the area a national wildlife refuge. At the spillway crest the lake covers 1,900 acres, and waterfowl use it as a winter refuge.

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

• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 2.4 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.
• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 14 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.
• Deaf Smith County Historical Museum — 16 mi
  Hereford's county museum in an early Catholic school: the Windmill City's pioneers, a half-dugout and caboose outside, and work by the Italian prisoners held south of town in the war.
• Cadillac Ranch — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• Umbarger — 2.9 mi
• Town of Dawn — 3.2 mi
• Homesite of W. F. Heller, Pioneer Farmer — 12 mi
• C. Stuart Johnston — 13 mi