Hutchinson County Museum

Borger was a promotion. After oil was found nearby, A. P. "Ace" Borger and the lawyer John R. Miller bought a townsite near the Canadian River in March 1926 from John and Maggie Weatherly's ranch and advertised it hard. Within ninety days more than 45,000 people had come. A railroad spur, a post office and a three-mile Main Street of shacks followed by October. Thomas Hart Benton painted what he saw there in Boom Town.

Booger Town, as people called it, was soon run by a crime ring around "Two-Gun Dick" Herwig, the mayor's associate, with brothels, gambling dens and stills along Dixon Street. Texas Rangers came in the spring of 1927 and drove many out, but the violence went on. On September 18, 1929, District Attorney John A. Holmes was murdered by an unknown gunman, and Governor Dan Moody put the town under martial law for a month. Ace Borger himself was shot dead by an old enemy in 1934. The Depression ended the boom, and Borger settled into oil, carbon black and petrochemical production.

The county museum opened in 1977 on Main Street. It runs from fossils and the region's ancient peoples through Coronado's crossing and the ranches, beginning with Thomas Bugbee's north of the Canadian in 1873, to the discovery of oil. It is known for its scale models of the buildings at Adobe Walls as they stood at the 1874 battle; this guide sends readers to the museum, not to the battle ground.