Samuel Burk Burnett

Burnett was born in Bates County, Missouri, on January 1, 1849, and grew up on Denton Creek. In the panic of 1873 he held over the winter the 1,100 cattle he had driven to Kansas and sold them a year later for $10,000 profit, and he was among the first Texas ranchers to buy steers and graze them for market. A charter member of the cattle raisers' association in 1877, he was its treasurer from 1900 to 1922. He died on June 27, 1922, leaving an estimated $6 million, part of which became an endowment for Texas Christian University.

What the plaque says

A native of Missouri, Samuel Burk Burnett came to Texas with his family soon after the Civil War. He married Ruth Loyd of Fort Worth in 1870, and in partnership with her father, Martin B. Loyd, established the famous Four Sixes (6666) Ranch in 1875. Burnett became one of the most influential ranchers in the state and a major business leader in Fort Worth. Burnett's second wife was Mary Couts Barradel of Weatherford. U.S. resident Theodore Roosevelt is said to have named the town of Burkburnett after a wolf-hunting trip with Burnett in 1905. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 13 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Kell House Museum — 13 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 25 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 28 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• John Gerham Hardin — steps away
• First National Bank of Burkburnett — 0.7 mi
• Simon Peter Hawkins — 1.0 mi
• Fowler Discovery Well — 1.2 mi