Big Spring State Park

The town and the park are both named for the spring, which for a long time was the only reliable water for people and for the bison, pronghorn and wild horses within about sixty miles. Comanche and earlier peoples camped at it, and the city park that holds the spring today is named for the Comanche Trail that came by it. The first written mention comes from Capt. Randolph B. Marcy's journal of October 3, 1849, on his way back east from Santa Fe. Cattle drovers and emigrants followed, and some of them carved their names and marks into the rock of the hill, where they can still be found. The spring itself is a few miles away in the city's Comanche Trail Park.

The park sits on Scenic Mountain, one of a line of bluffs on the northern edge of the Edwards Plateau that rise 200 feet above the Rolling Plains. Three regions meet here, the Rolling Plains, the Edwards Plateau and the Llano Estacado, so plants and animals of all three overlap; livestock have been kept off since the 1920s.

The city gave the land to the state in 1934 and 1935, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the park in 1934-35 from limestone quarried on the hill. Their biggest job was the three-mile loop road to the summit, held up by mortarless retaining walls of blocks weighing as much as two tons. The pavilion, headquarters and pumphouse are theirs too. The park opened in 1936 and covers about 382 acres.