Red River Valley Museum

Vernon sits just south of the Pease River, at a place the Tonkawa called Eagle Springs for its nesting eagles. Robert Franklin Jones gave land for a townsite in 1880, the post office turned down the name Eagle Flat, and Vernon was chosen instead, possibly for Mount Vernon and possibly, the stories go, for a traveling whiskey salesman. It became the seat of Wilbarger County in 1881, the Fort Worth and Denver City reached it in 1885, and the town grew into the trading center of the cattle country around it.

The museum on College Drive takes that country room by room. The Berry History and Science Room covers Doan's Crossing and the Western Trail herds, and the Early Vernon History Room the first decades of the town. The Waggoner Room tells of W. T. Waggoner, who built his father's ranch into an empire of more than half a million acres and later an oil fortune, and of his granddaughter, the sculptor Electra Waggoner Biggs. She is best known for her bronze of Will Rogers on his horse Soapsuds, cast for sites in Oklahoma, Lubbock and Dallas, and the museum holds the largest known collection of her work.

The William A. Bond Trophy and Game Room is a different kind of record: nearly 140 animals Bond hunted around the world in the mid-twentieth century, among them a polar bear, a rhinoceros and a saiga antelope, species now threatened or endangered.