Clay County 1890 Jail Museum

When Clay County was cut from Cooke County in December 1857, the law named the county seat Henrietta, though no one now knows why; a feminine form of Henry, for Henry Clay, is one guess. In 1860 the town had ten houses and a store at the far western edge of North Texas settlement. During the Civil War, with the soldiers gone and raids increasing, the settlers left. Henrietta was deserted and then burned, and the county was officially unorganized. Attempts to resettle it after the war failed until the early 1870s, when families came back to stay.

The rebuilt county seat put up a red brick and sandstone courthouse with a dome in 1884, which still stands, and in 1890 a large jail a block away.

It is now the Clay County Heritage Center. The original cells remain, along with a gallows that was built but never used. The sheriff and his family lived in the same building, and their refurbished living quarters show the other side of the bars. Other rooms carry the county's history from the first settlement through ranching and farming to the twentieth century.