Deaf Smith County Historical Museum

Hereford grew up on the Pecos and Northern Texas Railway, finished from Amarillo in 1899. Its residents first called it Blue Water, for Tierra Blanca Creek, then renamed it for the cattle local ranchers brought in, and in 1898 the county voted to move its seat here from La Plata. With no surface water to speak of, the town lived on wells, and by 1904 some 400 windmills had earned it the name Windmill City. In 1910 D. L. McDonald drilled the first successful irrigation well into the Ogallala Aquifer north of town, the start of the irrigated farming that spread across the county in the 1930s and 1940s.

The county historical society opened its museum in 1967 in a red brick school the Catholic church built for its first parish school. Its theme is how the pioneers lived, worked and played: a general store, a chapel holding stained glass from the county's first churches, a kitchen, bedroom and parlor, a one-room school, a millinery shop and a hand-carved three-ring circus. Outside are a half-dugout, a Santa Fe caboose, a wooden windmill, early jail cells and a wagon barn with a chuck wagon.

During the Second World War about 5,000 Italian prisoners were held at a camp south of Hereford, and the museum shows items and art from the prisoners. The society also keeps the 1909 E. B. Black house, open for tours by appointment through the museum.