Town of Abernathy

Oil changed Abernathy after decades of slow growth. Its population held near 850 from 1930 into the 1940s and its business count between thirty and forty, but the discovery of oil nearby in 1946 and 1947 brought a boom, and by the early 1950s there were sixty-five businesses and 1,962 people. A sewer system followed in 1949. Businesses peaked at 114 in 1967, fell to forty-five in 1985 and were back to 114 by 2000. In 1980, 699 of the town's 2,904 residents lived across the line in Lubbock County.

What the plaque says

Town of Abernathy Founded when Santa Fe Railroad was extended from Plainview to Lubbock, 1909. Named for Monroe G. Abernathy (1868-1962), treasurer of South Plains Investment Company, firm which promoted townsite. Community prospered, becoming a major railhead for shipping of cattle. Several buildings from the defunct town of Bartonsite were moved here and new ones built. Center of civic activities was the "Old Tabernacle" (1918-1947), located on city square. In early days, before roads were built, broad plowed furrows marked way to house of town doctor. Economy is agriculture-based. 1973

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Silent Wings Museum — 12 mi
  The museum of the American combat glider pilots of World War II, in Lubbock's old airport terminal on the field where most of them earned their wings.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 15 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 17 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• American Windmill Museum — 17 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.

More markers nearby

• Struve Family Businesses — steps away
• Pearce Chapel-Strip Cemetery — 4.3 mi
• New Deal — 7.1 mi
• County Line Community — 11 mi