Site of John and Maggie Weatherly Half-Dugout Site

The Handbook of Texas explains how such shelters were made. A full dugout was a pit five to seven feet deep; the half dugout favored on broken ground was cut into a hillside for better drainage, with a front wall of sod, stone or logs holding the door and windows. Floors were tamped earth, sometimes covered with rugs, and walls might be whitewashed. Residents complained of snakes, spiders and salamanders in the roof, dirt falling on the table and, now and then, a cow stepping through the ceiling.

What the plaque says

This structure is a copy of a half-dugout erected in 1898 near this location by John (1865-1944) and Maggie Weatherly (1875-1968). The High Plains offered no native stone or timber for building materials. Instead, settlers lived in dugouts, built into the thick sod. Well-insulated, the dugouts were cool in summer and warm in winter. When building supplies became available, more elegant homes were erected. The Weatherlys were pioneer ranchers and civic leaders. Borger was founded on their original homestead after oil was discovered here. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 1.5 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.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 10 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 17 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 22 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.

More markers nearby

• Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail — steps away
• Beale Road — 0.2 mi
• First Methodist Church of Borger — 1.0 mi
• Grand Hotel and Grand Hardware Building — 1.5 mi