Crockett County Museum

Ozona is the only town in Crockett County, and it began in 1891 as Powell Well, when the surveyor E. M. Powell drilled a well near Johnson Draw, put up a windmill and offered water and land for a school, churches, a courthouse and a jail. It won the county seat that July and took the name Ozona for its open air. Cattle came in the 1880s, then Rambouillet sheep and Angora goats, and by 1920 sheep far outnumbered every other kind of livestock in the county. Oil came in 1925, but Ozona was never a boomtown. In 1954 a flood destroyed almost half the houses in town and killed sixteen people.

The museum is known as the biggest little museum in Texas, and its building has a story of its own. The three-story rock structure was built in 1926 as Ozona's Methodist church. A fire in 1942 gutted it, leaving only the stone walls, and it was rebuilt as the town hospital, which it remained until 1956. The county then bought it for a courthouse annex, and in 1958 agreed to share it with the museum, which took over the whole building in 1998.

The three floors cover the county from before the ranches, the people who lived along its draws and the soldiers at Fort Lancaster on the Pecos, through Spanish travelers and early settlers to the sheep, goat and cattle ranches that made it.