Site of Old Goodnight Ranch

This marker stands at the home that followed the Palo Duro years. After selling his JA interest, Goodnight bought land along the new railroad, and he and Mary Ann moved into their two-story ranch house here on December 27, 1887. Here he kept his buffalo herd along with elk and antelope, and shipped buffalo to zoos in New York, to Yellowstone and to Europe. The Queen Anne house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 and became a Texas Historical Commission state historic site in 2020.

What the plaque says

Site of Old Goodnight Ranch First ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Established in 1876 by Charles Goodnight 1836-1929. Noted scout, Indian fighter, trail blazer and rancher. The Burbank of the Range. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site — steps away
  The two-story house the Goodnights moved into on December 27, 1887, after leaving the JA, with a porch that looks over bison descended from the calves Mary Ann saved.
• Gem Theatre — 11 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Donley County Courthouse — 18 mi
  Bulger and Rapp's red brick and white stone courthouse of 1891, the oldest in use in the Panhandle, given back its third floor and towers in a 2003 restoration.
• Saints' Roost Museum — 18 mi
  Clarendon's county museum in the hospital Cornelia Adair built for JA cowboys in 1910, named for the nickname cowhands gave a Methodist town with no saloons.

More markers nearby

• Charles Goodnight — 0.2 mi
• Town of Goodnight — 0.5 mi
• Site of Old Goodnight College — 0.6 mi
• Dugout of W. M. Dye — 11 mi