Town of Dawn

Dawn's beginnings were a ranch dugout and, later, a mill. In 1887 Jim Moore, ranch boss of the T Anchor, built a dugout about six miles southwest of the townsite; J. H. Parrish bought it two years later and opened a store, and James N. Askren, who made brooms in a barn, started the area's first school in 1891. In the 1920s Dawn built the county's first school cafeteria. Henry Turner began a stone-ground grain business, and in the 1940s David Rodgers sold Deaf Smith corn meal and stone-ground whole wheat flour from his elevator here.

What the plaque says

Town of Dawn Had second post office in county, in 1889. Named by pioneers who saw here the "dawning of a new country." Santa Fe Railroad station house (a box car) was first building on site, 1905. Town was developed by W.E. Neal and sons in 1914, with lumber yard, hotel, bank and store. Now center of farming industry. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 5.1 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• Deaf Smith County Historical Museum — 13 mi
  Hereford's county museum in an early Catholic school: the Windmill City's pioneers, a half-dugout and caboose outside, and work by the Italian prisoners held south of town in the war.
• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 17 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• Cadillac Ranch — 23 mi
  Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.

More markers nearby

• Randall County — 3.2 mi
• Umbarger — 6.1 mi
• Hereford Christian College — 13 mi
• The Thompson House — 13 mi