Smith Building (Palace Hotel)

Smith's building rose in a land-selling boom. By 1910 ten real estate firms were working in Canyon City, among them the Texas Land Company and Keiser Brothers and Phillips, and a Commercial Club and other civic groups had formed around the 1906 incorporation. A waterworks and sewer system came in 1909, and the Santa Fe's Llano Estacado line linked the town to Floydada in 1910. By 1915 Canyon had 1,500 people, two banks, grain elevators, a tannery and the twenty-five-room Palace Hotel.

What the plaque says

Smith Building (Palace Hotel) J. Frank Smith constructed this commercial building in 1906, the year Canyon was incorporated as a town. Elected to the first city board of alderman, Smith operated a land company on the second floor. The ground floor was initially occupied by the Canyon Mercantile & Hardware Store. S. B. McClure opened the Palace Hotel at this location in 1912. A cafe, first operated by P. D. Casey, later shared the first floor. Despite several changes in ownership, the Palace Hotel remained in operation until 1960. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 0.7 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 — 14 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

• The Canyon News — steps away
• Clyde & Grace Warwick — steps away
• First National Bank — steps away
• Randall County — steps away