Site of The Dawson Saloon

The Dawsons were defying a promise the town had been sold on. The Odessa Land and Townsite Company, founded in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1886, advertised Odessa as a model town where no liquor would be sold. Its advertising also placed the town beyond the reach of dengue fever and frontier raids, and claimed it already had a post office, a Pacific Express office, a telegraph office and daily trains between St. Louis and San Francisco. Buyers were promised a healthful climate and fertile, inexpensive land that could easily be watered from underground.

What the plaque says

Site of The Dawson Saloon Frontier business of S.T. (TOL) and E.F. (LISH) Dawson, brothers. Lish Dawson, 1891-92 Sheriff of Ector County, had a barber chair in the Saloon, and helped tend bar. Liquor was in 40-gallon barrels. Ice for drinks was hauled from great lakes by Texas & Pacific Railroad. To avoid township restriction on liquor sales, Dawson moved saloon to the street; Tol was brought to trial for this. "White Ribboners"--Clubwomen opposed saloons. In the face Lish Dawson lost his office, and the business was closed. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.3 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 8.9 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Odessa Telephone Exchange — steps away
• Odessa Land & Townsite Company — steps away
• Site of The Odessa Sanitarium — steps away
• Ector County Courthouse — steps away