Walter Prescott Webb's Formative Years

Webb's The Great Plains, published in 1931, argued that westward settlement had stalled at the ninety-eighth meridian until new technology let it cross into the arid West. The book won Columbia University's Loubat prize and earned him his doctorate in 1932. As director of the Texas State Historical Association from 1939 to 1946 he launched the encyclopedia published in 1952 as the Handbook of Texas, and in 1940 he founded the Junior Historians. He died in a car accident near Austin in 1963 and is buried in the State Cemetery.

What the plaque says

Noted historian Walter Prescott Webb (1888-1963) came with his family to Stephens County at the age of four. Over the next seventeen years, Webb received an education in frontier life that formed the basis of his intellectual development and his theories on the role of the Great Plains in American history. Webb's father, Casner, was a rural schoolteacher and farmer. As he moved to different teaching assignments, the family moved with him. W.P. Webb thus was exposed to the physical geographical variety within the county that was so important to his western thesis. His neighbors were prime sources of frontier lore. Although Webb's public school experiences were infrequent, it was during these formative years in Stephens County that he developed his love of books and his desire to attend college. Also during this time, Webb was contacted by William Hinds of New York, who was to become his benefactor and a great source of encouragement for the young scholar. In 1906 Walter P. Webb received his teaching certificate and spent the next three years as a rural educator. In 1909, at the age of 21, Webb left his home in Stephens County to pursue his college education at the University of Texas in Austin. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.
• Old Jail Art Center — 23 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 25 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 30 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.

More markers nearby

• Stephens County Courthouse — steps away
• Camp Breckenridge, C.S.A. — steps away
• Picketville — 1.4 mi
• Parks Camp — 6.5 mi