Site of Wagon Yard

The yard served a cattle town built on the railroad. When the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway arrived in 1898, Canyon City became a major shipping point for cattle and cotton and a receiving center for coal and lumber. Acres of cattle pens went up on land donated by the town's founder, Lincoln Guy Conner. The Handbook of Texas records that W. C. Kenyon ran a wagonyard and seven saloons. Construction boomed after 1902 in anticipation of more rail service, and in 1907 a Santa Fe line reached Plainview.

What the plaque says

Site of Wagon Yard Ranchman's headquarters in town; slept in bedroll in his wagon or in room above the office. Cooked over campfire in yard. Overnight charges: .10 cents a horse; .50 cents a man. Feed and coal were sold, water was free. Hands were hired, horses doctored here. Yard existed about 1890 to 1921. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 0.5 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.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 13 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.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church — steps away
• Neblett Hospital and Clinic — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Canyon — steps away
• The Sad Monkey Railroad — steps away