Site of Old Happy

Railroads soon replaced the stage lines. A Santa Fe branch line built south from Amarillo reached Swisher County in 1906, and it later connected the county to Plainview; when the line was completed to Lubbock in 1910, the area sat on a major north-south railroad. The construction created two new population centers on the tracks, Happy and Kress. Farther north, the completion of the Santa Fe line from Canyon City to Plainview in 1907 retired the mail hack and stage line that had run between those two towns.

What the plaque says

Site of Old Happy The Hugh Currie family home, "Happy Hollow" (built 1891, near this site), was for many years only house on Amarillo-Tulia freight and stage lines. Settlers got mail and freight here. The U.S. Postal Department cut name to "Happy" for the post office. The town moved (2 miles west) to Santa Fe Line, 1906. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 16 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 17 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.
• Lighthouse Trail — 18 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 18 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.

More markers nearby

• Happy Public Schools — 0.5 mi
• Happy Cemetery — 1.2 mi
• C. Stuart Johnston — 14 mi
• Arney School — 15 mi