White Deer

The company headquarters the plaque names was run by a former frontier marshal. George Tyng, born in Massachusetts and schooled partly in Hanover, Germany, was United States marshal in Arizona Territory from 1874 to 1877, owned the Arizona Sentinel in Yuma and helped organize Mexico's Tehuantepec Inter-Ocean railroad. Hired in 1886 to manage the reorganized White Deer Lands, he moved the Diamond F headquarters near here in 1887 and pushed wells, windmills, fences and farm settlement. In 1906 an avalanche killed him at his silver mine in Utah's American Fork Canyon.

What the plaque says

White Deer Name taken from nearby creek, so called by an Indian legend of White Deer feeding there. Site of county's first water well, drilled at N Bar N Ranch, 1887. Also headquarters for White Deer Land Co. (formerly Francklyn Land and Cattle Co., a British syndicate with 630,000 acres of Panhandle land), which in 1902 sold its acreage for small farms and ranches. Located .5 mile east on railroad in 1906, it became supply town for settlers. Present townsite founded in 1908. Oil boom came in 1920s. Is shipping point for grain and cattle. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — 13 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.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 14 mi
  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.
• White Deer Land Museum — 14 mi
  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.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 20 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

• Jackson General Store — steps away
• First Presbyterian Church — 0.2 mi
• White Deer United Methodist Church — 0.4 mi
• Polish Settlers of White Deer — 0.4 mi