In 1878 the Methodist minister Lewis Henry Carhart founded Clarendon as a Christian colony, a sobriety settlement in a country of cow camps. The town had at one time seven Methodist ministers and no bars, so the cowboys called it Saints' Roost. Carhart started the Clarendon News, the first newspaper in the Panhandle, to report on the colony and draw settlers. When the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway passed six miles south in 1887, the town voted to move to the tracks, and the first site now lies under Greenbelt Lake.
The museum is in the Adair Hospital, built in 1910 by Cornelia Adair, the widow of John Adair and Charles Goodnight's partner in the JA, for the ranch's cowboys and their families. Rooms keep the hospital's examining table, a country store, a chapel with the first Methodist church's pipe organ, and photographs including the last legal hanging in the Panhandle, at Clarendon in 1910. The one-room house on the grounds was the hospital's segregated waiting room. A restored 1887 Fort Worth and Denver City depot and Donley County's 1904 Pauly jail have been moved here too.
The JA room tells the ranch story, and the work of Harold Bugbee, the western painter who grew up near town, has its own exhibit. A Red River War exhibit covers the fighting of 1874 in Donley County, and the museum keeps letters between Quanah Parker and Goodnight. One of the 22-foot steel arrows of the Quanah Parker Trail stands outside. Each September it hosts a chuck wagon cook-off named for Goodnight.
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