Seven Wells

The lake over the old wells is Champion Creek Reservoir, the Handbook of Texas says, owned and operated by the Texas Electric Service Company. The state issued its permit on May 28, 1957, and contractors Moorman, Dewitt and Singleton built the earthfill dam, 114 feet high, between May 5, 1958, and April 30, 1959, impounding water from that February. The reservoir normally holds 42,500 acre-feet and can hold 90,200, for industrial, recreational and municipal use, and a pipe through the dam feeds a pumping plant that supplies Lake Colorado City.

What the plaque says

This area, now covered by Lake Champion, was once the site of springs that originated from underground water which also supplied Champion Creek. They were called "wells" because the Seven Spring Basins closely resembled man-made wells. Buffalo tracks cut deep into the creek banks of soft sandstone indicated this was a watering place for great herds of bison. At least four trails crisscrossed the area where north and south Champion Creeks converged. For hundreds of years Indians also camped here, and in the 1880s a small, early Mitchell County settlement named "Artesia" grew up at the site of the wells. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heart of West Texas Museum — 4.4 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.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 6.3 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 23 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.
• Scurry County Museum — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• R.C. (Dick) Ware — 4.1 mi
• Texas & Pacific Railway — 4.4 mi
• Comanche Village Massacre — 4.4 mi
• Buffalo Trails — 4.4 mi