Well's Point

The railroad that dug these wells got no grant land for its line here. The Texas and Pacific was granted land only for track east of Fort Worth, 5,173,120 acres, and none for its trackage to the west, because that work was not finished in the time its charter allowed. In 1891 Attorney General Charles A. Culberson sued to recover 301,893 acres granted partly on sidetracks and partly on land not subject to location, and the state won back 256,046. The Interstate Commerce Commission later found that the railroad had realized about $3 an acre from its state land.

What the plaque says

Well's Point Texas & Pacific Railroad Wells. In 1879 railroad headed west out of Fort Worth. Preceding construction - on land later in town of Odessa - water wells were dug in July, 1881. Town section was thereafter called "Well's Point". One well was unusable because of alkali; other two wells supplied construction men, train crews. February 1886, just before Odessa lot sale, a group of townsite promoters came to Well's Point in "an armada of Prairie schooners" from Mariensfield (now Stanton). Odessa was born Aug. 4, 1886, on a section owned by T. & P. Railroad. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 2.6 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 — 6.5 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 — 14 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 — 21 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

• Ector High School — 2.0 mi
• Odessa — 2.3 mi
• The Jackrabbit — 2.4 mi
• Waddell Pecan Tree — 2.4 mi