Stephens County Courthouse

The oil that brought the 1926 courthouse came in spectacular fashion. More than 200 wells were drilled inside Breckenridge's city limits. On September 1, 1921, Keithly No. 1 blew in at 3,068 feet and drenched the countryside for two weeks until Humble Oil capped it. The Handbook of Texas says that in one year the Breckenridge field produced 15 percent of all the oil in the United States, more than Louisiana and Kansas together, and a third of Texas's output. By the early 1920s the town had two daily newspapers, ten theaters, eighty-nine oil companies and seventy-nine eating places.

What the plaque says

This ornate doorway was main entrance of the three-story red sandstone courthouse built here in 1883. Carved into these columns are the names of architect J.E. Flanders, County Judge E.L. Walker, and three of four commissioners. The fourth was omitted because he objected to the cost of the construction. A large cistern at the rear of the building provided water for the town. When the oil boom of the 1920s attracted more people to this area, and the old structure was replaced by a larger courthouse in 1926, this portal was left as a reminder of the county's pioneer heritage. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.
• Old Jail Art Center — 23 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 25 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 30 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.

More markers nearby

• Walter Prescott Webb's Formative Years — steps away
• Camp Breckenridge, C.S.A. — steps away
• Picketville — 1.4 mi
• Parks Camp — 6.5 mi