City of Snyder
Snyder, Scurry County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Originally established as a trading post on Deep Creek for buffalo hunters and called "Hide Town," because of many hide tents and dugouts, the city of Snyder takes it name from W. H. (Pete) Snyder, a Dutch trader who established a store here in 1878. A major event in the town's growth came in 1908 when the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railroad brought the "Iron Horse" to Snyder. The city incorporated in 1907. Late in 1948 the city moved into another era when the huge Canyon Reef Oil Field was discovered. With influx of oil field workers and personnel, the quiet county seat became an overcrowded boom town overnight, with the population jumping from 4,000 to 12,000 in a year's time. Today Snyder, the county seat of Scurry County, continues as a regional trade center for ranching, farming and oil production. (1966)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Snyder began in 1878 as "Hide Town," a rough camp of tents and dugouts where buffalo hunters traded on Deep Creek, taking its lasting name from trader W.H. "Pete" Snyder. The railroad's arrival in 1908 knit it into the wider economy, but it was the 1948 discovery of the vast Canyon Reef oil field that transformed the quiet county seat into an overnight boom town, tripling its population in a single year.
Why it matters
Snyder's arc from buffalo camp to railroad town to oil boom compresses the whole story of how the West Texas plains were settled and repeatedly remade by commerce.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1870s the Southern Plains were the scene of one of the fastest and most brutal changes in American history. Hide hunters spread out across the region, killing bison by the millions for hides that were shipped east to be tanned into leather. Within a few years the great southern herd was almost gone.
The end of the buffalo was tied closely to the end of the Plains tribes' independence. Along with military campaigns in the mid-1870s, it opened the region to ranchers, and then to farmers. Trading posts like the one on Deep Creek grew up to supply hunters and buy their hides.
Over the next seventy years, West Texas was remade again and again, first by cattle, then by railroads and cotton, and finally by oil. Snyder went through every one of those changes.
People & events
It began as a rough camp. Buffalo hunters gathered along Deep Creek to trade, living in hide tents and dugouts dug into the ground, and the place picked up a fitting nickname: Hide Town. In 1878 a trader named W. H. Snyder, known as Pete, set up a store here, and the town that grew around it took his name.
For its first decades Snyder was a small prairie settlement serving ranches and farms. The town incorporated in 1907, and the next year the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railroad arrived. The railroad gave local farmers and ranchers a reliable way to get their cotton and cattle to market and turned Snyder into a real trading center.
Then came 1948. Late that year the huge Canyon Reef Oil Field was discovered, and almost overnight the quiet county seat was overrun. Workers and their families poured in, and the population jumped from about 4,000 to about 12,000 in a single year. Housing, water, schools, and streets all had to catch up with a town that had tripled in size.
Its place in the American story
Snyder packs the whole history of the American West into one place. The buffalo trade, the railroad, farming and ranching, and the oil boom all shaped towns from Kansas to Montana, but rarely do all four show up so clearly in one town's story.
The hide trade that started Hide Town is a reminder of the environmental and human cost of westward expansion. Wiping out the bison destroyed a way of life for the Plains tribes and changed the land forever.
The oil boom connects Snyder to twentieth-century America. After World War II, the nation's appetite for oil soared with the spread of cars and suburbs, and West Texas fields helped meet that demand. Boom towns like Snyder show both sides of that era: sudden wealth, and the strain of growing too fast.
If you visit
Snyder sits in the rolling country of West Texas, where cotton fields, ranch land, and pumpjacks share the view. It's a natural stop on a road trip across the region, and the downtown around the courthouse square is the best place to feel the town's history.
As you walk around, try to picture the layers. Under the modern town was a camp of hide tents and dugouts; then came a railroad town of cotton gins and stores; then an oil boom that packed the streets with trucks and newcomers. Keep an eye out for local memorials to the buffalo-hunting days, which the town remembers with pride.
On your way in or out, watch for the pumpjacks nodding in the fields. They are the easiest way to see the oil story this marker describes, and they help explain why this ranching and farming town grew into the regional center it is today.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · W.H. "Pete" Snyder
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Built in 1907-08 beside Deep Creek, where the trail of Gen. Ranald Mackenzie's U.S. Cavalry had once run, this Snyder landmark housed the First State Bank & Trust Co., an early bank serving West Texas cattlemen and ranchers. It closed during the depression year of 1931 and afterward sheltered many tenants, including the local newspaper. Its Ionic-columned Greek Revival exterior survives unchanged from the day it was built.
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