Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D.

The Pampa that von Brunow reached in 1903 was barely a town. Its first resident, section foreman Thomas H. Lane, had lived in a half-dugout by the boxcar station, and its first frame building, a White Deer Land Company boardinghouse, had served the Matador Ranch as headquarters before Alfred Ace Holland made it a hotel. The townsite plat was approved only in 1902, when J. F. Johnson opened the first mercantile store. By 1910 about 400 people had a school, a bank and a drugstore, and in 1912 Alexander Schneider remodeled the hotel and organized a town band.

What the plaque says

Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. (October 27, 1862 - May 7, 1941) Born in North Carolina, Vittorio von Brunow moved to east Prussia with his family in 1864 and as a young man was educated in Vienna and Warsaw. He returned to the United States in 1892 to pursue his interests in research and technology, arriving in Texas in 1900 and in Pampa three years later. Von Brunow erected a frame house on this site from which he operated a drugstore and post and telephone offices in addition to his medical practice. As the area's first doctor, he often traveled many miles over dirt roads to care for his patients. Von Brunow also was active in community affairs and civic organizations for many years. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White Deer Land Museum — steps away
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — steps away
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• Roberts County Museum — 21 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 26 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Pampa — steps away
• Pampa — steps away
• Gray County 50th Year Anniversary — steps away
• Woody Guthrie — steps away