Combs-Worley Building
Pampa, Gray County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Designed by Amarillo architects W. R. Kaufman & Son, this structure was erected in 1931 to house the offices of the Combs-Worley ranching and oil interests and Pampa professions and businesses. Modern art deco architectural influences appear on the edifice in typical classical rhythm and form. Metal casement windows and storefront details further enhance the building's expression of the 1930s and the new wealth of the oil boom era. The Kaufman's other Pampa projects include the county courthouse (1929), city hall and central fire station (both 1930). All are part of Pampa's "million dollar row." Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1998
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1931 to house the Combs-Worley ranching and oil interests along with Pampa's professional offices, this building announced the Panhandle's new petroleum wealth in confident Art Deco lines. Metal casement windows and stylish storefronts marked it as thoroughly of its decade, the work of Amarillo architects W. R. Kaufman & Son. It stands among the grand structures of Pampa's "million dollar row."
Why it matters
The building is Art Deco made from oil money, a monument to the 1930s boom that transformed the ranching Panhandle into a landscape of derricks and sudden fortunes.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To understand this building, you have to picture the Texas Panhandle in the years right before it went up. For generations this was ranch country — a sweeping plain of grass and wind where cattle, not commerce, measured a family's fortune. Towns like Pampa were railroad shipping points and county seats, useful but modest, built low against the big sky.
Then came the oil. Through the 1920s, drillers proved the vast Panhandle field, and a landscape of windmills and fence lines began to sprout derricks. Money that had once moved slowly through herds and harvests now arrived fast and in cash. A ranching family with the right acreage could become an oil family almost overnight.
The Combs-Worley Building rose in 1931, right at the hinge of that transformation. That date matters: the rest of the country was sliding into the Great Depression, yet here a booming energy economy could still justify a confident new office block downtown. It was built to house exactly the two engines of that new wealth side by side — ranching and oil interests, together with the lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople who served them.
People & events
The building was the work of a father-and-son firm from nearby Amarillo, the architects W. R. Kaufman & Son, and it was far from their only mark on the young city. In the space of just a few years they had also given Pampa its county courthouse, its city hall, and its central fire station — the civic backbone of a town growing faster than anyone had planned for.
Taken together, these buildings formed what locals proudly called Pampa's "million dollar row," a run of substantial masonry structures that announced the town had arrived. To commission a signature architect for your courthouse, your firehall, and your leading office block within a handful of years is the act of a community betting confidently on its own future.
The Combs-Worley Building itself carried the names of ranching and oil interests, the kind of combined enterprise that defined Panhandle success in this era. A family might still run cattle across thousands of acres while collecting royalties from the wells beneath them — and this building gave that dual identity a downtown address.
Its place in the American story
Art Deco is often remembered as the style of big-city skyscrapers and movie palaces, the streamlined optimism of the Jazz Age. But its spread into places like Pampa tells a broader American story: the design language of modern prosperity traveling out along the rails and the oil pipelines into small towns that suddenly had money to build.
What you see here is a building speaking that national style in a distinctly Texan accent. Its clean geometric lines, its metal casement windows, its careful storefront details — these were the up-to-the-minute choices of 1931, the same vocabulary being used in far larger cities to say "we are new, we are modern, we are rich."
It also embodies one of the defining shifts in twentieth-century America: the arrival of oil wealth and its power to remake a region's self-image almost overnight. The Panhandle's turn from a grassland grazed by cattle to a landscape studded with derricks was part of the larger petroleum revolution that reshaped the economy, the geography, and the ambitions of the whole country.
If you visit
Stand across the street and let your eye travel up the facade. The pleasures of a building like this are in the details rather than sheer size — look for the crisp geometric ornament and the rhythm of the metal casement windows, and notice how the whole design carries itself with a deliberate, upright confidence. This is architecture meant to be read as a statement of arrival.
Then widen your view to take in the neighbors. This building was one piece of Pampa's "million dollar row," so look around for the other civic landmarks of the same era and the same architects — a courthouse, a city hall, a fire station — and you'll start to see a whole downtown that was designed as a matched set in a few short, boom-fueled years.
It makes a rewarding stop on a Panhandle road trip precisely because it is so grounded in place. You are looking at oil money translated into stone and steel, in the very decade the Panhandle was changing forever. Give yourself a moment to imagine the traffic on this street in 1931 — the sense of a small town certain it was becoming a city.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Pampa City Hall
Pampa, TX
Pampa's City Hall rose from the Texas Panhandle oil boom of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when petroleum money funded a wave of ambitious downtown construction. Architect William R. Kaufman designed the Beaux Arts building to harmonize with the Gray County Courthouse he had also designed, giving it triumphal-arch entrances and classical pilasters. Completed in December 1930, it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1987.
Pampa
Pampa, TX
Pampa began in 1888 as a telegraph station on the Southern Kansas Railroad, cycling through the names Glasgow and Sutton before manager George Tyng of the White Deer Land Company named it Pampa. Surveyor A. H. Doucette platted the town in 1902, and its first school, church, and mayor followed over the next decade. A 1920s oil boom transformed the sleepy railroad town, and in 1928 it captured the Gray County seat from Lefors.
1934 Pampa Post Office Building
Pampa, TX
By the 1930s Pampa was a Panhandle boomtown, its population swelled after oil was discovered in the area in 1926. To serve the growing community, the federal Works Progress Administration built this post office in 1933–34, its Spanish Renaissance Revival styling—tile roof, arcaded loggia, rounded windows, and carved stonework—typical of the ambitious public architecture of the New Deal.
White Deer
White Deer, TX
White Deer took its name from a creek and an Indian legend of white deer that fed there. The county's first water well was drilled at the N Bar N Ranch in 1887, and the site served as headquarters for the White Deer Land Co., successor to a British syndicate that held 630,000 Panhandle acres before selling them off for farms in 1902. The arrival of the railroad and, later, a 1920s oil boom turned it into a shipping town for grain and cattle.