Shackelford County

Shackelford County spans two kinds of country: its eastern side belongs to the Cross Timbers and its western side to the Lower Plains, all on Permian limestone under thin loamy clay. A strip of blow sand held in place by vegetation runs a mile wide and twenty-five miles long across the northwest corner. The Clear Fork of the Brazos cuts that corner, leaves for Throckmorton County and comes back in at the northeast. Once open prairie, it is now mostly mesquite and chaparral savanna, and great blue herons and kingfishers fish its streams.

What the plaque says

Formed from Bosque County; created February 1, 1858; organized September 12, 1874. Named in honor of Dr. Jack Shackelford 1790-1857; captain of the "Red Rovers," a company from Alabama which became a unit of Fannin's command - one of the few spared by the Mexicans in the Massacre at Goliad. Albany, the county seat. (1936)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Jail Art Center — 0.5 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 15 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 23 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 29 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• Robert Edward Nail, Jr. — 0.4 mi
• Shackelford County — 0.5 mi
• Texas Cattle Trail — 0.5 mi
• Lt. Col. William E. Dyess — 0.5 mi