The Jackrabbit

Odessa has kept the animal close. The city claims the world's largest jackrabbit, a statue the Handbook found in a temporary home in front of the Ector County school district's administration building. Its other ambassadors are the Odessa Chamber of Commerce Chuck Wagon Gang, founded in 1940, business and professional men who donate their time and have served barbecue to thousands as goodwill for the city. Odessa is also home to the only museum in the United States devoted solely to the office of the presidency, dedicated in 1965, and to the White-Pool House of 1887.

What the plaque says

The Jackrabbit True plains Rabbit. Lives only in the west. Burro-like ears gave him his name. color is protective, blending with sand and dry grass. Very long legs make him a swift runner, clocked at speeds to 45 miles and hour. Object of hunts with Greyhounds. Was prized by plains Indians for food and fur. to white man a reminder of desert-hard life. In drouth and depression, meat source for thousands. Subject of tall tales. Actual hero of world's only Jackrabbit Rodeo, in Odessa, May 1932. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.8 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 8.9 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Odessa — steps away
• Odessa Petrochemical Complex — 0.2 mi
• Earl George Rodman, Sr. and William Douglas Noel — 0.2 mi
• First National Bank of Odessa — 0.3 mi