Window on the Plains Museum

Moore County was ranch country when Louis Dumas came up from Grayson County in 1891 to start a town and put in for post offices. The railroad turned it into something else. Gas was found, and in the 1920s and 1930s plants followed: a pumping station for the Canadian River Gas Company south of Dumas from 1928, and in 1936 an American Zinc smelter that started as one of the smallest horizontal retort zinc plants in the country and grew to one of the largest, employing more than 380 men. In the 1940s the Exell Helium Plant west of Masterton began making helium, and it ran until 1998. On July 29, 1956 the Shamrock Oil and Gas plant twelve miles northeast of town exploded. Workers lived in company camps beside the plants.

The museum keeps that history in its archives and exhibits. It began in 1976 as the Moore County Historical Museum in the ballroom of a hotel and moved in 2001 to its own building on ground that was once part of the Burnett ranch, funded in part by a Daugherty bequest. Inside are a ranch house with a Majestic range, a replica of an early 1920s family home with a blue roof, a camp meeting, a stagecoach, and rooms on business, industry, family life and wildlife. Outside are the city's 1929 fire truck, a windmill that marks the museum, and a flagpole made by World War II prisoners of war. It is run together with the Dumas Art Center, and admission is free.