Waddell Pecan Tree

Pecans became a small part of a thin farm economy. By 1982 agriculture brought Ector County about $4.5 million a year, from beef cattle, poultry, pecans and hay, on 214 farms and ranches with 1,752 irrigated acres. That year the county reported 11,616 cattle and 26,331 pounds of pecans. The rest of the economy dwarfed those sums: manufacturers, mostly of petrochemical products, earned $233 million, and oil brought in almost $1.5 billion from 46 million barrels. Scanty rain and little irrigation, the Handbook says, still held agriculture back.

What the plaque says

Waddell Pecan Tree A few years after Odessa was founded in 1881, a squirrel stole a pecan from a neighbor's porch, and buried it in the yard of W. T. Malone, planting this tree. A rarity in the downtown area, it became a well-known landmark. When R. T. ("Cotton") Waddell (1889-1964) and his wife Mary Lee moved from their ranch to this home on July 1, 1926, they found entire neighborhood enjoying the native pecans from their tree. The R. T. Waddells, younger generation of a family influential in this region since the 1870s, gave time and talent to civic works as freely as their tree gave shade. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.5 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 8.9 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Site of The Odessa Sanitarium — steps away
• First National Bank of Odessa — steps away
• Ector County Courthouse — steps away
• Odessa Land & Townsite Company — steps away