Town of Washburn

Washburn began as railroad works. The Denver Road drilled two water wells and put up a double pump station, a coal chute, a section house, a depot and stock pens, and when the fifteen-mile Panhandle Railway to Panhandle City opened in 1888, the town boomed almost overnight with tents, dugouts and board shacks. Losing the 1890 county-seat election to Claude began its decline. The tap line passed to the Santa Fe, leased in 1898 and sold in 1900. A Methodist church came in 1907, the post office closed in 1956 and 120 people lived there in 2000.

What the plaque says

Town of Washburn Planned by R. E. Montgomery, son-in-law of Fort Worth & Denver City Railway Builder-President Gen. G. M. Dodge. Named for family friend. Promoted 1887, Washburn for a time was F.W. & D.C. Line's terminus. It had first newspaper on Plains-- "Armstrong County Record". Also had general store, lumber yard, 2 hotels, 2 saloons. Became junction point, branch line connecting F.W. & D.C. with Santa Fe Railway at Panhandle. Remaining as town dwindled: Judge Jas. Logue, donor cemetery site and founder Washburn State Bank, 1908; H. E. White, owner of store, lumber yard and elevators. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gem Theatre — 13 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 15 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 16 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Lighthouse Trail — 16 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.

More markers nearby

• St. Francis Catholic Church Community — 6.7 mi
• First Tree Texas High Plains — 11 mi
• Claude Cemetery — 11 mi
• Charles H. Roan — 11 mi