The Founding of Colorado City

The Handbook of Texas says a second boom came to Colorado City between 1900 and 1906 with an influx of farmers, and the town had 3,000 people in 1906. By 1910 it had a new public school, a waterworks and an electric plant. In 1914, with its population put at 1,500, it had two banks and a newspaper, the Colorado City Record. The drought of 1916-18 hurt local farmers. By 1926 the town had a city hall, paved streets and a new sewage system, and in 1931 an estimated 4,761 people and 200 businesses.

What the plaque says

Founded, 1880, at the crossing of the Colorado River and Texas & Pacific Railroad right-of-way; central shipping point and supply depot for the sprawling cattle ranches of West Texas and New Mexico. From 1880 (when A.W. Dunn opened his dirt-floor, tent-roof general store) to 1890 the boisterous cattle town garnered notoriety as well as fame. The largest community between Fort Worth and El Paso, Colorado City had more millionaires than any other Texas town and the most saloons in the West. Law and order was housed in a dugout at the edge of town, where a company of Texas Rangers made all men check their guns. Modest, courageous Ranger Dick Ware was elected first sheriff in 1881. Population soared from 700 to 5,000 in the first two years, as cowboys, cattlemen, merchants, and (as a visitor said) "any number of bummers", vied for space. The first sermon was preached in a saloon and the town "jail" was a chain attached to a mesquite tree, but citizens could find beauty in the lantern-glow from dozens of tents in the center of town. Although drouth and the passing of the open range soon diminished Colorado City's glory, its first decade won for it the epithet, "Mother City of West Texas". (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heart of West Texas Museum — 0.3 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 5.8 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.
• Scurry County Museum — 20 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 24 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.

More markers nearby

• Mitchell County — steps away
• Texas & Pacific Railway — 0.2 mi
• Buffalo Trails — 0.3 mi
• Col-Tex Refinery — 0.4 mi