Red River Valley Museum

The Ray gift reaches back well before the Comanche. The museum's Berry gallery shows select pieces of the J. Henry and Ethel Ray collection, fossils as well as native artifacts, and traces human history in Wilbarger County across more than ten thousand years. Elsewhere in the building the jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden is remembered with personal effects his family gave after his death in 1964, and a display of memorabilia recalls Roy Orbison. The museum was established in 1965 and later moved to the Vernon College grounds.

What the plaque says

Red River Valley Museum Features one of Texas' famed regional collections of Indian artifacts, tracing history of early man along the Red River. Before Chisholm Trail days, when thousands of cattle crossed Red River at nearby Doan's Crossing, Vernon area was home to tribes of Comanche, Kiowa, and Wichita. Mr. and Mrs. J. Henry Ray of Vernon spent 30 years gathering artifacts, which they donated to Wilbarger County, Oct. 14, 1963. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Red River Valley Museum — steps away
  Vernon's museum on College Drive, with rooms on the Waggoner ranch empire, Doan's Crossing and early Vernon, and the largest known collection of Electra Waggoner Biggs's art.
• Doan's Crossing — 13 mi
  A store, an adobe house and a granite marker of ranch brands at the Red River ford where the Western Trail herds left Texas, kept alive by a May picnic held since 1884.
• Copper Breaks State Park — 25 mi
  Red badlands on the Pease River between Quanah and Crowell, streaked with the green copper that lured a Civil War general here to mine, with longhorns and a dark-sky designation.
• Quanah, Acme and Pacific Depot Museum — 26 mi
  The Spanish Colonial Revival depot of a little railroad that set out for El Paso and never got past Floydada, now Hardeman County's museum alongside the county's 1890 jail.

More markers nearby

• Wilbarger County — steps away
• Early Wilbarger County — 2.1 mi
• Thaddeus Edgar Johnson — 2.3 mi
• Jonathan Doan — 5.1 mi