Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel

Cisco was a railroad crossing before it was a town: the Houston and Texas Central crossed the Texas and Pacific near the settlement of Red Gap in 1881, and the people moved to the junction and took the name of a New York financier. The Eastland County oil boom later filled it with oil men.

Conrad Hilton came to Texas in 1919, after Army service in the First World War, meaning to buy a bank. When the deal in Cisco fell through, he bought the Mobley, a 40-room hotel so busy with oil men that rooms changed hands as often as three times a day and the dining room was turned into more rooms. It was the beginning of a hotel empire. He opened a new Texas hotel every year from 1925 to 1930, among them the Dallas Hilton in 1925, the Abilene Hilton in 1927 and the El Paso Hilton in 1930.

The restored Mobley is now the Conrad N. Hilton Center, with a gallery on the innkeeper, a Cisco museum and an exhibit on the town's most notorious day. On December 23, 1927, Marshall Ratliff, wearing a borrowed Santa Claus suit, led three men into the First National Bank. Children followed Santa down the street; a woman slipped out and raised the alarm; a $5,000 bankers' reward for any robber shot in a holdup helped turn the robbery deadly. The gunfight was followed by the largest manhunt the state had seen.