Rankin was a small ranching town of about a decade's standing, made county seat of Upton County in 1921, when the Yates field came in across the Pecos in October 1926. It sat on the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway, the nearest railhead to the new field, and overnight it became the supply and service town for the oil companies. Ira Yates, the rancher on whose land the discovery well was drilled, became a millionaire almost as fast. Within months he built a hotel near the depot, one of the first fireproof hotels in the region, for the oilmen arriving by train.
The Yates Hotel now holds the Rankin Museum. The lobby still has its original wicker furniture, phone booth and ceiling fan. Upstairs, ten guest rooms keep the 1920s fittings: steam radiators, louvered doors and shared bathrooms down the hall, and some rooms still post their Prohibition-era rules on liquor. The exhibits reach back to the turn of the twentieth century, with period clothing, 1920s license plates and a cowboy's metal bacon box among them.
The boom did not last in town. Rankin's population fell in the Great Depression, but the hotel stayed, and it shows what the oil money of 1926 bought in a hurry beside a rail line.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour