Childress County
Childress, Childress County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Young and Bexar Territories. Created August 21, 1876. Organized April 11, 1887. Named in honor of George Campbell Childress 1804-1841. A member of the Convention in 1836. Co-author of the Texas Declaration of Independence . Childress, the county seat.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Childress County was created in 1876 and organized in 1887, carved from earlier territories. It honors George Campbell Childress (1804–1841), a delegate to the 1836 convention and a principal author of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The city of Childress serves as the county seat.
Why it matters
The county's name keeps alive the memory of a founder of Texas independence, tying the Panhandle's late settlement back to the Republic's founding documents.
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Related people
- · George Campbell Childress
Related events
- · Texas Declaration of Independence
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Colonel Wm. Edgar Hughes of the Mill Iron
Childress, TX
Born in 1840, William Edgar Hughes came from Illinois to Texas in 1859 and rose from private to colonel in Confederate service, fighting at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Nashville. After the war he taught school, read law, and built a banking empire stretching from Dallas to Denver, then in 1880 bought into the Mill Iron Ranch, assembling a vast spread that eventually ran up to 50,000 head of longhorns across four counties. He sold the last Mill Iron herd in 1918, the year he died.
Goodnight Trail
Childress, TX
During the dangerous frontier years of 1866–71, this was a stretch of the great cattle trail blazed by Col. Charles Goodnight, carrying thousands of Texas cattle north to U.S. forts in Colorado and New Mexico. Herds watered at this spot on the drive. The site later became the town of Childress in 1886, and the old watering hole is now a lake in Fair Park.
Childress Cemetery
Childress, TX
Established in 1887, Childress Cemetery took shape just as the town and county were being organized on the newly opened plains of the Texas Panhandle. Its founding coincided with the arrival of railroads and settlers who transformed this open ranching country into farming and market communities in the late nineteenth century. The state's designation of it as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2008 recognizes it as a lasting record of those first residents.
Site of Buck Creek Stage Stand
Childress, TX
Frank Chriss established the Buck Creek Stage Stand in 1882 as a stop on the mail route running from Wichita Falls to Tascosa. Such stands offered rest and relay for the coaches that carried mail and passengers across the still-open plains. Within a few years the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad reached the region, and the stage stand was abandoned in 1886.