River Valley Pioneer Museum

Canadian was laid out in the spring of 1887 by the Kansas Railway Townsite Company on the south bank of the Canadian River, where Red Deer Creek comes in. When the Southern Kansas Railway finished its bridge that summer, the settlement of Clear Creek across the river, known as Hogtown, packed up and moved over. Canadian has been the county seat ever since. On July 4, 1888, the Cowboys' Reunion staged a commercial rodeo, one of the first in Texas, and the town has held one every year since.

By 1900 Canadian was a railroad division point with roundhouses, cotton gins, elevators and banks. It had as many as thirteen saloons until Hemphill County voted dry in 1903, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union building still stands and houses the library. Among its leading merchants was Nahim Abraham, who had come from Lebanon. The railroad took its roundhouses away in the early 1950s, but ranching, farming, oil and gas kept the town going.

The River Valley Pioneer Museum tells this eastern Panhandle story, from Spanish explorers and the battles of the 1870s to the railroad and the oil booms, in permanent and changing exhibits on settlement, ranching, oil and the railroad. Staff can tell the history of the 1916 wagon bridge over the river, now a footpath. The museum hosts a student art show each year and a fall foliage festival, and the town's Autumn Foliage Tour comes in October.