Terminus of the Santa Fe Railroad, Panhandle, Texas

Bypassed or not, Panhandle stayed tied to both railroads. In 1889 a fourteen-mile line joined Panhandle City to Washburn, a station on the Fort Worth and Denver City, linking the two systems. In 1908 the Southern Kansas of Texas extended its line from Panhandle to Amarillo, completing the Texas section of the Santa Fe's transcontinental route. The oil boom brought branches: a thirty-two-mile spur from Panhandle to Borger in 1926 and a ten-mile spur from White Deer to Skellytown in 1927. At times 65,000 cattle waited in Panhandle's loading pens.

What the plaque says

Terminus of the Santa Fe Railroad Panhandle, Texas Originally "Carson City", town name was changed 1887 when this site appeared to be the future metropolis of the Panhandle: it was to be at the junction of Santa Fe (under name "Southern Kansas") and Fort Worth & Denver City railroads. Plans changed, however, and the F.W. & D.C. took a route 16 mi. south, bypassing Panhandle (Amarillo was soon founded on the F.W. & D.C.). Even so, Panhandle became a major shipping center. During great ranching era and again in 1926 oil boom, it moved more freight than any other town on Santa Fe line except Chicago. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — 0.7 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Gem Theatre — 16 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 23 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 24 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.

More markers nearby

• John A. Holmes — 0.6 mi
• Texan Hotel — 0.7 mi
• Panhandle — 0.7 mi
• Conway Community Church — 0.7 mi