Town of Iowa Park

Iowa Park's post office opened in 1888, and the Texas Panhandle Company organized an immigration train from Iowa to fill the new townsite. The town incorporated in 1891, the same year a fire destroyed much of it. Drought and the panic of 1893 made the 1890s hard, but by 1900 Iowa Park had 792 people. Oil south of town lifted the population from 602 in 1914 to 2,041 in 1926, and a concrete highway linked it to Wichita Falls by 1927. Rail service ended in the late 1960s, yet the town kept growing, reaching 6,233 people by the mid-1970s.

What the plaque says

One of many small towns that sprang up ahead of the railroads as they crossed Texas in the 1800s. Located on the Fort Worth and Denver City Line, this town was first named Daggett's Switch in 1885 for a prominent rancher and railroad official. F. W. & D. C. contractor Gen. G. M. Dodge (already famous as builder of the Union Pacific) spearheaded the founding of Iowa Park by actively promoting a town on land he owned here. Many people from the Midwest--especially Iowa--were recruited to settle the infant town. Land promoters D. C. and A. J. Kolp, from Iowa, drew up a plat which featured many parks, in 1888. After this first period of rapid growth, Iowa Park settled down to more than 20 years of prosperity based on a thriving farm economy. Lightning struck, however, in 1918 when oil was discovered on a farm south of here. Speculators flooded the city and land prices sky-rocketed. The Iowa Park Producing and Refining Company was chartered in 1921 and operated until 1932. The boom itself gradually exhausted the resources here and was over by 1925. In 1924 the Wichita Valley Agriculture Experiment Station was built and is still functioning. A steady farm economy prevails again today. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kell House Museum — 10 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 11 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 21 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Royal Theater — 25 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.

More markers nearby

• Site of Wichita Valley Refinery and Texas Oklahoma Fair — 0.2 mi
• Tom Lloyd Burnett — 0.4 mi
• Site of Valley View School — 7.6 mi
• Van Dorn Trail — 7.8 mi