Pioneer Museum

Sweetwater took its name from a creek of sweet water in a country of bitter gypsum streams. Before the Civil War few settlers came; after it the buffalo hunters did. In 1877 Billie Knight ran a dugout store for hunters near the creek, and in 1879 the county's first post office opened there. It was first called Blue Goose, the story goes, because a local cowboy shot a great blue heron believing it was a goose, and then Sweet Water, two words until 1918.

When Nolan County organized in 1881 the place had only a couple of tent stores, but it was named the county seat, and the Texas and Pacific Railway began service the same year. A store building put up in 1881-82 for $8,755 served as jail and courthouse until a real courthouse was built in 1891. Grand juries in those years returned indictments across the county for murder, assault and gambling, though Sweetwater itself seems to have been quiet.

The Pioneer Museum is in the restored 1906 house of Judge and Mrs. R. A. Ragland. More than a dozen rooms trace the county's settlement through photographs, furnishings, farm and ranch tools and Native American artifacts, the domestic side of the town that later grew around Avenger Field and the railroad.