Site of the Town of Margaret

When the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient bypassed Margaret in 1908, its residents moved the business center three miles southwest to the tracks. The Handbook of Texas says the town flourished for a time there, with a railroad station, a hotel and other businesses, then declined in the 1930s and 1940s as farmers grew fewer and the main highways passed it by. In 1940 Margaret had a post office, a store, a gin and 100 residents. Its school, built in 1909, closed in 1943 and was remodeled as a community center. The town reported fifty-one people through 2000.

What the plaque says

First known as Pease. Renamed in honor of Margaret Wesley, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Wesley. First Anglo-American child born in Hardeman County. First County Seat of Hardeman County, 1884-1890. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fire Hall Museum — 8.3 mi
  Crowell's local museum in the 1922 firehouse on Main Street, in a county-seat town that was almost wiped away by the tornado of April 1942 and rebuilt.
• Copper Breaks State Park — 8.8 mi
  Red badlands on the Pease River between Quanah and Crowell, streaked with the green copper that lured a Civil War general here to mine, with longhorns and a dark-sky designation.
• Quanah, Acme and Pacific Depot Museum — 18 mi
  The Spanish Colonial Revival depot of a little railroad that set out for El Paso and never got past Floydada, now Hardeman County's museum alongside the county's 1890 jail.
• Red River Valley Museum — 18 mi
  Vernon's museum on College Drive, with rooms on the Waggoner ranch empire, Doan's Crossing and early Vernon, and the largest known collection of Electra Waggoner Biggs's art.

More markers nearby

• Foard County — 6.6 mi
• First Christian Church — 8.2 mi
• Robert L. Foard — 8.3 mi
• First Officials of Foard County — 8.4 mi