Motley County Historical Museum

In 1878 Henry H. Campbell sold a herd of longhorns in Chicago at a handsome profit, went into partnership with the banker A. M. Britton and came back to start a ranch on the Pease rivers of Motley County, country from which the Comanche had just been driven and the bison killed off. He set up in an abandoned buffalo hunter's dugout at Ballard Springs, bought 8,000 of John Chisum's Jinglebob cattle, and in 1879 organized the Matador Cattle Company. In December 1882 a group of Dundee merchants bought it for $1,250,000, and the Matador Land and Cattle Company, Limited, became the largest of the foreign-owned beef companies, run from 1890 by Murdo Mackenzie with leased ranges as far off as South Dakota, Montana and Canada. It stayed in Scottish hands until 1951.

The town grew out of the ranch. When the county organized in 1891, Campbell laid out the townsite, and to meet the state rule that a county seat have twenty businesses he had cowboys open one-day enterprises. Campbell became the first county judge and a cowboy, Joe Beckham, the first sheriff. Resentment of the ranch's grip on the county ran high enough that settlers beat the ranch's candidates in 1896.

The museum fills the hospital Dr. A. E. Traweek built in 1928, with rooms on its own medical history, veterans, ranching, saddle making, schools, the county's Native people and a diorama of early Matador. It doubles as the chamber of commerce.