Scurry County

Indian artifacts show people in the area as early as 1,000 B.C., the Handbook of Texas says. Apaches held it until the early eighteenth century, when Comanches and others displaced them, and the Comanche war trail to Mexico crossed the county. Tom and Jim Nunn drove longhorns from South Texas to found the first large ranch in 1877. In 1880 the county had 102 residents, eight of them Black, and it was attached to Mitchell County for courts until 1884. By 1910 it had 1,424 farms and ranches, 10,924 people and more than 37,000 acres in cotton.

What the plaque says

Formed from Young and Bexar territories; created August 21, 1876; organized June 28, 1884; named in honor of General William R. Scurry 1821-1864; member of the last Texas Congress; a distinguished officer in the Confederate Army; Snyder, the county seat. (1936)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — 2.6 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 23 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 32 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.

More markers nearby

• County Named for Texas Confederate William R. Scurry 1821-1864 — steps away
• Scurry County's Canyon Reef Oil Field — steps away
• Home County of Famous Frontiersman J. Wright Mooar — steps away
• Santa Fe Railway in Scurry County — steps away