Site of The Odessa Sanitarium

The county the old sanitarium came to serve was new and nearly empty. Ector County was marked off in 1887 from land assigned to Tom Green County and attached to Midland, Crane and Upton counties for judicial purposes. Odessa had been one of nine stopping places on the railroad through West Texas since 1882, named, the Handbook says, by a railroad official who thought the country looked like the steppes of Russia. The 1890 census counted 224 people in the county, and when it organized in 1891, Odessa, the largest town, became the county seat.

What the plaque says

Site of The Odessa Sanitarium Established in 1886 by Odessa Townsite Company, the Odessa medical and surgical sanitarium was directed by Dr. R.E. Haughton, a former railroad physician from Indiana. It was located in a two-story wooden structure of twenty rooms. By March 1890 the project had failed. Dr. Haughton moved to Midland. The building became a have for migrant families. A portion was used as a church. When Ector County was created in January 1891, the sanitarium was moved several blocks and became the first Ector County Courthouse. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1967.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.4 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 — 9.0 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

• Ector County Courthouse — steps away
• General Matthew D. Ector — steps away
• Ector County Land Rush — steps away
• Odessa Land & Townsite Company — steps away