Texan Hotel

The supply houses that filled the Downs Hotel served a field in full flood. By late September 1926 the Panhandle field averaged 120,870 barrels of oil a day from 427 wells, and railroad tank cars hauled 10,000 to 14,000 barrels a day to refineries. Output peaked in 1927 at more than 40 million barrels. Waste came with it: by 1929 the field supported forty-four gasoline plants and fifteen carbon-black plants, and voluntary proration gave way to statewide proration, ordered by the Railroad Commission on August 14, 1930.

What the plaque says

Texan Hotel During the height of Carson County's oil boom in the 1920s, the major oil field supply houses headquartered in Panhandle, and lodging was in great demand. In 1926, Clark B. (d. 1946) and Margaret (d. 1967) Downs opened the Downs Hotel to help meet this need. It was renamed the Texan Hotel when the property was conveyed to J. H. Paul (d. 1960) in 1932. Later owners converted the Texan Hotel to apartments but continued to make a few rooms available for guests after World War II. By the early 21st century, the Texan was the only hotel built in Panhandle during the oil boom years that remained in operation. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — steps away
  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

• Panhandle — steps away
• Texas Panhandle Pioneers - John F. Weatherlys Family — steps away
• Panhandle Herald — steps away
• Oldest Bank in the Texas Panhandle — steps away