Alley Oop Park and Iraan Museum

Iraan exists because of one well. On October 28, 1926, the Ira G. Yates 1-A, drilled with cable tools on the Yates ranch near the Pecos, reached 992 feet and began making 450 barrels a day. The Yates field grew so fast that pipelines and tanks could not keep up, and on October 1, 1927, it became the first Texas field placed under field-wide proration, each well given a share of the pipeline in proportion to its potential. The town that grew up beside it was named for Ira and Ann Yates in a contest whose prize was a town lot. Tents, shacks and bunkhouses came first; the Ohio Oil Company built company houses and in 1927 hired the first teachers. By 1930 Iraan had about 1,600 people.

One of the men who came for the boom was V. T. Hamlin, from Iowa, who worked in Iraan in the late 1920s. The Handbook of Texas calls him a local newspaperman; he went home to Iowa in 1929, and his comic strip about the caveman Alley Oop was first published in Des Moines in 1932 and then syndicated nationally. Hamlin either got the idea for the strip in Iraan or drew its first drafts there, and in 1965 the town dedicated a park to the character.

The park has giant figures from the strip, including a dinosaur, and an RV park and a wind turbine on display. Its museum covers the Yates field and Permian Basin oil, Native American archeology and the town's own history.